artistic genius ?

My hubby, L, used to love going around the streets every year during hard rubbish collection time.
He'd bring home all kinds of stuff that he thought would be useful.
Half used cans of paint, old prams, boxes of nuts, bolts and screws, etc.
Most of these things ended up back in our own rubbish pile or just straight into the bin.
But there were a few things that made it into the garden as art. Broken or weathered statues for instance.
This owl pictured below came with bits chipped out and no colour on him. He was fixed with plaster left over from another project and painted with old paint that someone had thrown out.
The cage he's in was another find.

The two pieces of stained glass window you can see once adorned the prettiest little garden shed I've ever seen.

This bird statue (?) was carved from a piece of treated pine as far as we could tell. Dried out, cracked, unpainted, it came home one year to be cleaned, cracks filled in, painted with discarded green paint and decorated with model paint that L asked me to bring home on the way home from work. Tied to the edge of my washing line, it looks pretty good.

Here's a closeup of the head.

This door decoration was constructed from a plank of rough pine that was part of the shed wall. Eyes were cut from an old broomstick.

This is on the door to the smaller shadehouse along the side of the house. My fruit trees used to be in there. The shadehouse itself is put together from all kinds of bits and pieces and covered with discarded shadecloth in assorted colours sewn together with fishing line. it looks like it will fall down at any moment, but it's been up for seven years now.

Here's the head.

On one of L's scrounging trips, he found half a bag of plaster in good clean condition. He brought it home and made this little Meerkat family. Just from looking at a picture of some in a magazine and copying. Painted them with the same discarded paint as the owl in the top picture, and glued on tiny shards of broken mirror for eyes. They weren't at all weatherproof, so had to live in the carport. But after a couple of years, one of them broke when accidentally hit with a broom, (I was sweeping leaves and knocked it off the edge of the table), and in later years the rest began to crumble. Sadly, this year, they are no longer with me.

There are other little bits and pieces around my garden, some made by L, some salvaged from roadside dumps, some bought at the reject shop.