By Laurelle Walsh
Students in the Methow Valley School District’s REACH program (Responsive Education Alternatives for Children at Home) are putting the finishing touches on a collaborative art piece that utilizes recycled plastic bottle caps to create a work of beauty.
The result is a large mural titled “Methow Valley Sunset” that will soon be hung at Methow Recycles, the valley’s recycling center in Twisp. A second mural titled “ART” will hang in the Methow Valley Elementary School art room.
The project was the brainchild of REACH coordinator Tirzah Quigley, who worked closely with Methow Arts Alliance teaching artist Margaret Kingston to make the idea a reality.
“I wanted the Thursday group to do an art project with beautiful colors and I asked myself, ‘What’s free?’” Quigley said. She started collecting plastic bottle caps and Googled “bottle cap art,” where she discovered the work of professional artists who had made portraits using bottle caps. One artist even reproduced Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” in bottle caps, Quigley learned in her research.
“Methow Valley Sunset” depicts a colorful mountain landscape through which a river flows. Snow-capped peaks loom above green hills dotted with yellow balsamroot. A glorious flaming sunset blazes above it all.
The mural is rendered in bottle caps on a sheet of ¾-inch plywood. After the students achieved consensus on the image (“a really great lesson in itself,” Quigley said), Kingston sketched an outline on the board and “we did a practice run,” by laying out bottle caps, Quigley said. The students discovered that objects with finer details didn’t work well in that medium, so they abandoned some ideas and simplified the design as they went along, she said.
With the design finalized, students painted the scene onto the board so everyone would know where to put the variously colored caps. Then, starting with about six different shades of green caps in as many sizes, the students began laying out the circular caps, nesting smaller caps inside larger ones, resulting in the textured depth of a mosaic.
Once they were happy with the placement, the students set each cap in place with a dot of hot glue before securing it with a metal screw. The process continued with various shades of blue, yellow, orange, red, pink, purple and white plastic caps.
The bottle caps were collected over several months from students’ homes and at Methow Recycles. The students washed and dried the caps and sorted them into bins by color. “I see bottle caps differently now,” said one student. “I see all colors differently — I’m color blind,” said another.
All the kids interviewed said the project had been a lot of fun. “It really shows what we can make with plastic,” one student commented.
The REACH program
There are 26 kids in the REACH program, in first through eighth grade. The program offers enrichment activities to enhance the home school curriculum. Students in the program can take advantage of services offered in the district such as elective classes, drivers education and sports.
As REACH coordinator, Quigley meets weekly with a group of 14 home-schooled students in grades one to five, who come to the elementary school every Thursday to participate in physical education classes or to work with her on collaborative art and writing projects.
“They come on the school bus at the beginning of the school day, have lunch and recess with the other kids, and then take the bus home,” Quigley said. Home-schooled students are also invited to participate in all Methow Arts events that come to the elementary school, she said.
In conjunction with the bottle cap mural project, REACH students studied the color wheel and complementary, warm and cool colors with Kingston. They read and wrote poetry about color. They even studied the psychology of color: how color affects mood, what colors mean in different cultures, and how colors affect men and women differently, Quigley said.
“The kids think it’s neat to do an art project with untraditional materials,” Quigley said. Since they were working with recycled bottle caps, the Thursday group asked questions about plastics such as “What is plastic made of?,” “How long does it last?,” “What is it used for?” and “What else can we make with plastic?”
The mural will be a permanent fixture at Methow Recycles, according to Ashley Lodato, arts education director at Methow Arts Alliance. “It’s kind of more special for the kids to have a piece of permanent art in a public space,” Lodato said.
As for the Thursday group, they’re already thinking of other ways they can use recycled materials in art projects. Stay tuned.
