Painting Styrofoam

Sep 22

1 min read

“THERE’S GOT TO BE SOMETHING I CAN DO WITH THIS #@*& STYROFOAM”

Long before there was recycling for Styrofoam, you could only dispose of it in the garbage. All meat was sold in Styrofoam trays. That is…unless you purchased your meat over the counter where it was wrapped in paper. This drove me crazy. Always looking for ways to repurpose materials into art, it occurred to me to reuse the Styrofoam trays as a base to do a painting on. It would also provide a solid surface where I could use pine needle weaving to stitch on a decorative border. After cleaning and sanitizing the Styrofoam trays, I used Acrylic Molding paste to attach canvas. Applying Gesso to the surface gave me a clean, strong, non-absorbent surface to paint on.

I had a lot of fun painting simple pictures. I could frame the painting by punching holes through the canvas and Styrofoam and weave border around the tray edge. It was similar to the crochet edges my mother used on doilies.

-Martha