We were inspired to take part in Mommy Labs Forest Fiesta blog-hop to create some artwork which celebrates the forest.  I love trees, and miss them hugely when they’re not around. (I once lived somewhere with very few!) I am now lucky to live somewhere with lots of mature trees around, and find them a constant inspiration as they change through the seasons.  And of course I also like to use the materials they provide to create artwork with, so for this post we decided to continue with the scanner art we did last week, but this time using leaves and twigs as our starting point. Of course much of this artwork could just as easily have been created as a collage, or some of it even outdoors as Land Art, but I liked the way we could ‘add to’ and embellish what we had created very easily, the weather has been very wet recently, and we just enjoyed using the scanner.

My 6 year old created this Forest Scene from scanned in leaves, and added a snow-capped mountain range in the background (complete with skier) and some animals and birds etc.

We also created some Forest Critters, some Leaf Critters, some more scenes, and even some stick insects – in the true sense of the word! In fact we were so prolific that  there isn’t space to show them all here! The critters were embellished with googly eyes, paint, pen, ribbon and cut-out paper, but of course you could use whatever you wanted.

Forest Critters – Naked!

If anyone without a scanner would like to have a go at creating their own scenes, I plan to upload some of the images – ready for embellishment, to my Freebies section in the next week or so. I will let everyone know on my Facebook page when I’ve done this.

And finally, it occurred to me that if anyone wanted the perfect book to accompany the Forest Critters, it would be Julia Donaldson’s Stick Man