The Four Elements

“Nature that framed us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.” – Niccolo Machiavelli

This turned out a bit different than what was envisioned but isn’t that how life works? Anyway, on with it….

Y’all know how we’ve been tearing pages out of some trashy books to use in a project or two? No, not sexy trashy – they just weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. Okay so, we needed to use the book covers (hardcovers!) for something too…but what? We cut them off with an exacto knife and just let them sit for a week. There were two blue covers and two orange covers – then it hit us – The four elements! This is what happened when we were avoiding the horrible, mind-numbing TV shows that are on these days.

The Four Elements are Earth, Air, Fire & Water. Earth and Fire will be orange – Air and Water will be blue.

Earth – Stability

For the first of the four elements, earth, we selected stones, a twig for a tree and then shoved a little sheet moss to fill in a gap or two. We used the always amazing E6000 adhesive (for all four elements).

Air – Thought

For Air we did a little bit of wire work with aluminum wire to represent the wind. After that was glued down we added a couple feathers.

Fire – Action

Fire needed some wire work too, but for Fire we used copper wire and a red aluminum floral wire. Than at the last minute we decided to add a little charcoal at the base of the flame that we had saved from an expired water filter (waste nothing). All glued with E6000.

Water – Emotions

On the water book cover we selected a sand dollar and a couple seashells then glued them down. At the last minute we added some glass beads – yup, the same glue.

Then we glued them with more E6000 (alternating the orange and blue) onto a board – added wall hanging hardware and our four elements artwork was complete.

We hope you liked this one, we had fun making it! Again, the challenge we had was using stuff we had around the house. We went through different ideas – fire was almost represented by a candle, then matches but we finally agreed on wire work.

See what you come up with!

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