Art Time – Nature Collage

 

This little art project is perfect for a window decoration this time of year! I was thinking of simply finding and gluing objects from nature onto a piece of sturdy cardboard.  M is such a glue guy.  And he wanted to do the whole play-doh collage in an egg carton project again, which was very cool, and very tempting… but then I was reminded of contact paper collages by this post at One Hook Wonder.  They are so easy, and always turn out so lovely with the autumn sunlight shining through.  So that’s what we did!

First, M grabbed his “nature basket” and headed outside to see what he could find:

I made a point of telling him no rocks, and no sticks bigger than a finger.  I wanted to avoid the frustration that would come if he tried to stick something too heavy to the contact paper.  He searched and searched, and mostly found an assortment of leaves (I love the bright red ones!), a couple of dandelions, small pinecones, and one small stick. :)

He brought everything in and set it on the table while I cut the contact paper.  Ours is roughly 7” x 20”.  If all of your nature items are flat, you can cut 2 pieces and sandwich the items in between.  They are sure to stay put that way.  Since M had some lovely 3-dimensional objects, we chose to just use one piece of contact paper.

 

 

When he was done arranging items and sticking them down, we hung the finished collage in his bedroom window.

  Beautiful. :) 

And this way the birdies can enjoy it too. 
(M is always thinking about birds.  I wonder if he will be an ornithologist?)

 

It was so much fun, and we realized the next day that we’d missed all the pretty red maple leaves in our front yard, so we made another one!

 

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

The Art Box – Oct. 11, 2010

In the Art Box last week: lots of colored paper, watercolor paper (in the back with a paperclip on it), watercolor paints, watercolor pencils, markers, glue, glitter glue, scissors, a small container with little goodies in it for collaging (lower left), a pinecone, stickers, and cardboard ribbon spools.

I’ve been trying to find a good way to keep M’s art supplies organized, and found this little utensil carousel at Target.  It’s great for markers, pencils, scissors, glue, etc.  But, the picture looks a little crowded, doesn’t it?  Maybe next week I’ll set everything out all nice and pretty before I take the picture.  Didn’t you know I have all the time in the world to do things like that? ;)  Okay, maybe not.  We’ll see. ;)

Despite the plethora of good art supplies, not much art was done.  We’ve had a run of summer-like days this fall (I guess to make up for the fall-like days we had in summer), and much of our time was spent outside.  Some beautiful items did make their way into nature collages, but those are for a post later this week.

However, despite the beautiful weather, M can’t resist anything sparkly.  Once he saw the glitter glue and some sparkly bug stickers he had to take time out from his outdoor play to put a couple of things together. 

A glitter glue, sticker collage: 

And whatever this is, with glitter foam pieces (more sparkles!):

That was it.  Just some quick bling and then back to jumping in the leaves.

I did find time to put up some art strings in our home.  Here’s one:

We’ve got 4 of them up in a variety of places – stairwell, family room, bedroom.  My (unspoken to M) hope is that I can s l o w l y start taking down a few pieces of art that he’s just randomly taped on the walls and move them onto the art strings, and eventually only have M’s art on the strings except for a few very special things that we’ll leave in the kitchen, perhaps in frames.  That’s the plan, anyway.

If you have a kid's art post, link it up below! Be sure to link back here somewhere in your post.

Have a beautiful day! :)