Painting without paint or a brush!!!

Outdoor Hour - Challenge #3 - Time to draw

For Henry, who doesn't go a bundle on doing art work, i try to steer away from plain drawing or painting, trying to make the experience a little more unusual if possible.

Most days we get out for a walk with our dog. So for yesterday's walk i took a bag to collect all kinds of things from nature that we might be able to use for an art project.

Henry got very into putting things into the bag...so much so we had an overflowing bag by our return home! During our walk i asked Henry to think of what we could use to draw or paint with, with some help he suggested sticks and feathers. I picked some blackberries and elderberries and got Henry to guess what we might use these for, he was very intrigued by the idea of making paint from them......even more so wh

en i told him we would paint with mud when we got home!

Back home i put all our findings out on a piece of paper and provided a fairly absorbent type of paper for Henry to create his art work on.

To start with i suggested Henry try painting with

mud, He chose a stick and created brown lines all over his page.

Next Henry tried out squashing black berries then rolling them with a stick....beautiful purple designs started to develop. Amazingly, every blackberry had a slightly different colour! Elderberries were squashed and rolled, and finally back to the mud with a rose hip and a feather to create some more brown patterns.

I was totally amazed how well this idea worked. After a good hand wash, the very unusual piece of art has pride of place on our fridge! - whoever said you needed paint and a paintbrush to create a masterpiece!!!