Creating Art with Nature

“Creating Art with Nature”
Julie Goldstein

I love to be in nature, I get so inspired and excited about the textures, space and overall experience. The children also love to be in nature and often create drawings or collect objects from nature to use in their artwork. For this particular project, we went on a walk through The Glenn and collected all kinds of objects including pinecones, pine needles, rocks, seedpods and leaves. We went back to The Studio and created beautiful paintings full of textures, colors and even created some music by listening to the sounds of the pine needles smacking against the paper and rocks rolling in the paint. This project is so easy to do, a bit messy but well worth it!

Materials:

• Natural found objects: pine cones, pine needles, seedpods, leaves, and rocks…
• Black construction paper
• Tempera paint (I used orange, green and purple mixed with white)

Instructions:

1. Take the kids out in nature and help them find objects that might be good to paint with. (I set up an area and stocked it up with objects for them, this is particularly important for the younger kids)
2. “Today we are going to paint! What do tool do we typically paint with? (A Paintbrush)… Well, today we are going to paint with the things that we found in nature!”
3. Demonstrate color mixing and then use the pine needles first. Dab it into the paint and splatter it down onto the paper. Then switch colors to show the kids out to create texture, overlap and color mixing while working with these objects.
4. Show how to use all the objects, stamping the leaves and rolling the pinecones.
5. Pass out the paper, additional materials and let the kids CREATE!

Have Fun!