Creative Gift Wrap

***Creative Gift Wrap***

 

It’s become our family tradition to make gift wrap from whatever is on hand. It’s fun and creative and gives you a healthy sense of self expression. Part of the fun of the gift is in the wrapping. We make do with things we already have.

Leela, our daughter had her birthday the last week of July so we went to Borders to find treasures for her. Wrapping books of course is a breeze. 

 This gift wrap was made from old Christmas paper turned        

inside out and the bows are from spiral bound sketchbooks

For gift wrap and embellishing journals I keep a small box of stickers, mostly the ones from wildlife organizations that send them with address labels and interesting pictures from adds and magazines and different textured substrates I find, such as the plastic from  garlic gloves. Gift wrapping for me is scrap booking with a bow, of sorts.

The purple plastic is from garlic cloves

 on tissue paper

    The Rise of the Planet of the Apes came out the day before we visited Leela and because she is a Planet of the Apes fanatic we all went to see the movie with her. It’s a great movie, BTW, so good and this gave me a themed inspiration for some of the gift wrap.

 More tissue paper over inside out Christmas wrap

note gorilla, information on the human brain,

and paint swatches cut for a mosaic effect

Knowing her fascination with apes

I keep a few in my box for just such occasions

Later I added heart stickers from my dogs heart guard

and some drawn hearts

I get concerned when people tell me they can’t do art, well craft is a kind of art and here is some great stuff you can do to access that creative "hands on" side of your brain. No one should think they can’t create art,  you dress yourself, this takes into account all sorts of artistic determining such as, texture, color proportion. You decorate your home, just aspects of art, again: color, size or proportion, style, taste, so much artistic decisions go into the way we look and the way we create our living spaces.

 This is a memory box, basically a box that is a time capsule.

I made this several years ago while attending a workshop with the wonderful

Suzanne Benton, here I put wishes and blessings into the box,

I will open mine when I move into my new studio in New Mexico.

I will often give ideas to expand your creativity as I blog and hopefully inspire some readers who are intimidated by art to play and learn to enjoy creating and then you will appreciate art on such a deeper level and have access to one of the great joys in life, visual creative expression.

 Pictures from a magazine and a photo of Leela

with ball point pen emblishment frame around the dancer 

and hearts.

Please feel free to write to me and share your experiences and ideas on this subject.  Aleada Siragusa