If you are someone who enjoys arts and crafts you have found the perfect post. Painting can be quite expensive if you are considering oil paints and professional art supplies, but you can make art by using items that you can find outside!! Nature holds all colors possible in flowers, grass, soil etc… By compressing things such as leafs, flowers, grass, etc… and mixing these items with some water you can easily make water color paint. It as a very easy activity to create and it would even save you some money. Not only that but you can also create natural paint brushes by attaching grass or flowers to small branches with a rubber band; this will create different stroke patterns and it is also money efficient. Truly you can do these activities without spending a single dollar because all the materials you need are right out of your door. You can do these activities with friends or if you have an audience of smaller children, they would love this. It enhances fine motor skills and lets them explore different mediums and textures.
Image Sources + More Activities:
Experimenting with Natural Paints
Artful Kids
This time of year is good for experimenting with natural paints and pigments. It’s easy to forget that in the not too distant past, all dyes and paints had to be obtained from the natural world, directly from animals, minerals and plants. The resulting colours may not always have been as bright as those obtained from chemical sources, but they have a beauty and subtlety of their own. As a teenager I got heavily into experimenting with natural dyes – I think I was not only an unusual teenager in this respect, but had remarkably tolerant parents who were willing to put up with the foul smells from pots of plant material bubbling away on the stove. The process for dyes is slightly different, as you usually have to use a mordant or fixative to make the colour permanent, which can also affect the colour obtained, but the idea of extracting colour from natural materials is the same. Continue reading…
Making natural paints and inks from plants
Gumnut Magic
I’ve been making an exciting foray into the world of natural paints and inks. It’s not so different from natural dyeing really. You can use the same dye plants but just create a really strong dye bath by using a higher proportion of plant material to water. If the colour isn’t quite strong enough when you strain it, simmer it down until you reach the desired effect. Continue reading…
Humans in Nature 