Crafting Nature Prints and Collages

The natural world is full of items with unique shapes and interesting textures. Use some of the stuff from around the yard to create an artistic collage or print an homage to the great outdoors.

Materials:

Large sheets of paper (and/or a white piece of cardboard)
Paintbrushes and paints (and/or contact paper and wax paper)
Items such as flowers, leaves, seeds, twigs, shells, pebbles, blades of grass and whatever else you can find -- pending parental approval.

Instructions:

To create a colorful print, paint each of the objects you've found, turn them over and press them into the paper like they're stamps. You can experiment by using various amounts of paint, as well as by mixing different colors together. Create a wild scene or a more orderly montage.

For the nature collage, take another collection of found objects (flowers, leaves and grasses will work best) and place them between two pieces of waxed paper inside a thick book. After a day or two, they should have flattened out and you can arrange them on the contact paper facedown. Lay the cardboard on top, pressing it down snuggly and folding the edges of the contact paper around to make it secure. Then flip everything over and your living collage is ready to go.