Painting With Nature

Every time we visit a local park, Lorelai takes her “critter box” or a plastic baggie to collect ‘goodies’. This time, she collected acorns and pine cones. The reason behind this is a long ongoing project: her fairy house. She came up with the idea to make a fairy house out of an old amazon box. We taped it together and cut out a door and windows, and she has been decorating it a little each day ever since. I’m not going to show it on here until she deems it’s done, though.

So today, she made some artwork with her acorns and pine cones. I thought it would be neat to let the acorns roll around in the paint and make marks on the paper. That worked well until they started bouncing out of the old cookie sheet…. I had no desire to clean up paint off of the carpets today, so I handed her a paintbrush and instructed her to push them around the page instead. She created this awesome abstract piece! After the acorns, she dipped the pinecons into the paint and pressed and rolled them on a new sheet of cardstock. This created cool dots and triangles.

Once those two projects were finished, she finished up by turning the paper plate, which was holding the paint, into a piece of art itself. She practiced writing while the paint was still thick. In the end, she drew a fairy. Once everything is dry, she will hang up the artwork on the fairy box and glue down the now-colored acorns and pinecones to the side.

All in all, a very fun afternoon art project. Painting with objects other than paintbrushes is a nice spin on a favorite activity. I hope you get to do it someday!

Tip: Use a cookie sheet with sides. Talk with your child about the different marks each acorn and pine cone make. We spun the acorns around a few times to see how that mark differed from the mark that were made from just pushing the acorn. Let your child enjoy the process of making his or her art piece. Afterall, it’s the process, not the end product, that truly matters!

Have you ever tried painting with nature? How did it go?