When was the last time you picked up some paint color sample chips at your local hardware store? Do you remember what you did with them once you were done? Most of us use them to compare colors for a project and toss them soon after, but in the hands of children those chips of color can become something new and extraordinary.
Chip Art Reduces, Reuses, and Reimagines
The Chip Art Project is a unique initiative hatched from the imagination of the Fresh Artists founder, Barbara Allen after she discovered a series of brilliantly colored paper mosaics on brown cardboard in Philadelphia art teacher Robyn Miller’s classroom. Instead of using traditional tile or ceramic pieces, Miller’s fourth-grade students dove into a shoebox of used color chips saved from her home improvement projects to create collages of fish, birds, butterflies, and turtles, mimicking traditional mosaic art. Under her guidance, students cut and glued tiny pieces of the discarded color samples to cardboard resulting in colorful, eye-catching pieces.
Seeing enormous potential in this clever reuse of a common throw-away, Barbara and Robyn developed a lesson plan entitled “Healthy Food Choices” (portraits of fruits and veggies) that Philadelphia-based nonprofit Fresh Artists could provide for severely underfunded public school art teachers.
With a mission grounded in sustainability and creativity, the Chip Art Project is making a bold statement: even the most overlooked materials can inspire masterpieces.
Chip Art Inspires Life
When Fresh Artists debuted this new art medium at a National Art Education Association annual meeting in New York City, art teachers clambered for this new, sustainable “green” art-making product. With the strong backing of Behr Paint, Fresh Artists has now distributed thousands of Chip Art Kits free to art teachers in severely under-resourced low-income public schools!
The true beauty in the program stems from the fact that it’s about more than crafting pretty pictures; Fresh Artists transformed the idea into a kit, complete with a classroom-tested, national arts standardized lesson plan, a huge, beautiful step-by-step art room poster and enough materials for at least 200 students. Behr Paint’s leadership in their Santa Ana, CA headquarters became interested in the Fresh Artists prototype project and pitched in to donate millions of obsolete colors to fill their classroom kits instead of landfills! Chip Art is a model to demonstrate to young children how we can better use the resources already around us, especially in schools where funding for arts education is scarce.
It’s an innovative form of circular economy thinking, reminding us that creativity and sustainability aren’t mutually exclusive and underscoring the incredible potential of paper and paper-based products. Fresh Artists has 528 pieces of Chip Art in their Corporate Art Collection from which corporations may select large reproductions for their office decor. Companies seeking a Fresh Artists installation should email Barbara Chandler Allen (bcallen@freshartists.org) for more information.
You May be Eligible to Chip In
At its core, the Chip Art Project is about connection: between kids and color, between communities and creativity, and between the overlooked and the extraordinary. Through the tactile joy of arranging paint chips into personal and collaborative works of art, students are learning that art and the materials that make it can come from anywhere. Whether it’s paint chips, recycled magazines, or everyday printer paper, these accessible materials can become the foundation of something meaningful. Paper is reusable, recyclable, and already a staple in classrooms, so it doesn’t take much to turn it into a canvas for learning and self-expression.
Full-time art teachers in public schools with 70% to 100% of the student body qualifying for “Free or Reduced-Price Lunch” may request a classroom-size Chip Art Kit on Fresh Artists website. Kit availability may vary and teachers are asked to pay the modest flat-rate USPS shipping only. To learn more about Fresh Artists, be sure to read the Spring & Summer edition of Paper Matters, available now!
