Creatively repurposed gift #3: Rusty junk art

Inside of my handmade gift challenge, I secretly challenged myself to make my brother a bunch of gifts re-purposing odd stuff I found in my basement. Fun, right? This is one of the gifts.

Find: I have a bad habit of picking up rusty pieces of metal and other random objects in parking lots, etc. and bringing them home thinking that I’m going to do something with them. After years of accumulation, I decided it was finally time to make something.

I started with a piece of plywood and mixed a deep blue with some artist acrylics. I painted over a bad painting from my college days. Plenty of those available.

Then I arranged my metal pieces and flipped them around until I liked the way they looked. Staring at them helps. In general, they move from rusty in the bottom left corner and progress to super shiny in the upper right. Once I was for sure truly happy with them, I used some strong E-6000 adhesive to stick them down and let them dry flat overnight.

I ended up finding a few more pieces in my stash after the rest were glued down, so I worked those in as well. And done! Not for all tastes, I’m sure, but I like the way it turned out. Part of me loves that rusty industrial decay look.