Coloring with Nature

Today, we are going to color with nature! With items from your yard, or your neighbor's yard WITH permission, or from your refrigerator. Leading up to Easter, I posted directions for dyeing Easter eggs with mixes from natural ingredients from your kitchen, but this process uses nature directly rubbed onto a piece of paper.

From my yard, I collected dark pink rose petals, purple hosta flowers, green lemon balm leaves, red-orange begonia leaves, yellow begonia leaves, and a homegrown blueberry (one of the few the birds didn't steal). You and your child can collect whatever you find colorful including different shades of green leaves and bark. You can also look in your refrigerator for fruits and vegetables that are hard enough to hold and "draw" with...butternut squash, spinach, beets but remember they stain everything.  A word of warning - berries are messy but make good color! You may need to mush them and apply color with a paintbrush or q-tip.

This works best on a plain white piece of paper since the colors will be light as your child colors. The picture can be a scene or something specific or just a collage of the colors as the child rubs the different items onto the paper. This is especially good practice for those little fingers to pinch and hold onto something. Be sure to talk about color being pigment, what happens as they color, that some items "color" a different color, what does it feel like, and which items produced the lightest and darkest colors. There is no right or wrong, only discovery. This is pure science at its most fun!