Why sunny days are the best kind for making art for your walls
Sunshine is so rarely considered as an art material, but for me it’s been the making of my creativity.
Sunshine is such a wonderful material to play with. There are so many meaningful ways to make art with it, but the benefits of working with it go much further than that; sunshine lifts our mood, it creates a feeling of calm and mindfully connects us with nature throughout the day.
Whilst spending so much time at home during the pandemic I became so much more aware of the patterns created by sunlight on the walls inside our house. The sway of the tree branches in the breeze making motion pictures on our walls had me transfixed. I was missing being inspired by different surroundings and art exhibitions, typically relying pre-pandemic on being out and about to stir my creativity and curiosity. Being limited to staying within my own four walls did my creativity a lot of good. It forced me to learn how to feel creative with very limited inspiration and be creative with very little to hand.
One evening when putting my 3 year old son to bed I spotted the clean rectangle of light from the window resembling a hanging frame cast onto his bedroom wall as the sun slowly set. The very next day I began having a play making shadow wall art and started sticking different hand cut newspaper shapes into the window. If I spotted that the sun was shining in the late afternoon I would run up to my son’s bedroom to see where in his room the shadow artwork was cast and sometimes sit with him and my newborn baby in my arms and watch the beautiful quality of the light flicker and fade on the walls.
Our home became our own little gallery. With the shadow pictures, I started to love how it rarely looked the same twice, or was even in the same place on the wall twice. It was a timely reminder of how the joy of creativity is very much in the doing and not just the take-home end result.
There are some wonderfully talented artists and creators doing such fun things with shadows. Kumi Yamashita creates such clever light-shadow installations, I’ve been a long time fan of how Jill Burrow uses shadows within her styling concepts and I love how artist Olafur Eliasson uses shadow to put people and their experience at the centre of his art.
Here’s 3 ideas to inspire your own sunshine and shadow wall art…..
1 ~ Symbols of hope
You’ll need:
Blu tac/sellotape
Newspaper
Scissors
A rainbow was the first shape I ever stuck up in the window. That week in April 2020, early in the pandemic, I chased rainbows. I chased a promise of good things to come, a hopeful future and quite literally chased a rainbow shadow around my son’s bedroom!
To make your own symbol of hope artwork cut out any meaningful shapes or words from newspaper and stick them up to the inside of a window where the sun shines through when it either rises or sets using blue tac or sellotape. Then simply keep an eye out for the art appearing, fading and moving on the wall. Depending on the season the tone of the light from the sun will differ and can give some beautiful results differing from a bright off-white in Spring/Summer to a deep orange or a calming ombre pink effect in Autumn/Winter.
Helpful tip: The closer the window is to the wall the shadows appear on depends how crisp the shadow will appear, and might affect the size of the cut outs you put up in the window.
2 ~ Artwork inspired by nature
You’ll need:
Blu tac/sellotape
Newspaper
Scissors
Cut out any shapes inspired by nature, the simpler the shape the more striking the artwork tends to be, and follow the directions as described above. If you want to capture it on camera, as well as a photo it’s also fun to film it in time lapse mode on partly cloudy days as the artwork repeatedly disappears and reappears.
3 ~ A meaningful silhouetted self portrait
You’ll need:
Yourself
Maybe you are just going about your day as I was, my little girl on my hip as is often the case since she rarely lets me go anywhere without her! After putting away some clothes in her wardrobe we turned to leave her bedroom and saw our mother-daughter silhouette cast on her bedroom wall. It was a beautiful piece of art and a memory of a period of our life I wanted to keep.
I’ve seen some beautiful silhouetted photographs of Mums-to-be during their pregnancies capturing their changing body shape that I just think are so very special. Here’s one captured by my dear friend @laurenosullivan carrying her little girl.
If you’ve felt inspired by this post and would love to know when I release my next one then please come and join me over on instagram at @kimbeaubevan where i’ll let you know when the next one is live, along with sharing other inspiration and musings on creativity in family life.
If you share any of your shadow wall art on Instagram I would love to see it! Use the hashtag #makedowithme and tag me too. Please do share the link to this blog post with a friend who you think might enjoy the inspiration.