Botanical Papers – Part 2
So, you’ve scanned in your plant material and created your botanical wrapping paper and tags, but what else can you do with those scanned images? If you have access to some digital photography software it’s really easy to use those images to create some special writing paper. To create the wrapping paper below, I cropped [...]
Pin ItBotanical Papers – Part 1
As regular readers of Artful Adventures will know, one of my favourite creative tools is our humble office scanner. I love the way it is simple to use, and creates images which are somehow both 3-dimensional and 2-dimensional at the same time. This project is one of those which started off with us all experimenting [...]
Pin ItForest Critters
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 [...]
Pin ItLand Art in the Spring
With all the fine weather we’ve been having recently, I’ve been keen to spend more time outdoors with the kids, so following on from my earlier seasonal posts on a natural theme, I thought I would complete the series by taking a look at some land art for the Spring. This is the time when [...]
Pin ItTreasures of the Sea
We’ve just got back from having a few days by the seaside. We were staying with a friend who has recently moved to live by the sea, and when I say by the sea, I mean within 100 yards of the beach, so it was a fantastic opportunity to spend lots of time there. [...]
Ice Lanterns
For the last of my ‘icy’ posts I thought I would include the ice lantern which we made over Christmas. Ice lanterns and ice bowls have been around for quite a while, and it seems the lanterns are even ‘traditional’ in some parts of the world. A few years ago I even had a commercially [...]
Icy Artwork
Following on from my summer and autumn posts about Land Art, it seemed appropriate to continue with a post about Winter Land Art. This is the time to create those snow sculptures – to go beyond the usual snowmen, and create snow castles and palaces, snow animals, or even abstract forms. Or how about some [...]
Pin ItLast of the Autumn Leaves
They say the Autumn colours have been better than ever this year. I live in an area with lots of tree-lined avenues, and the sight of the gorgeous colours, particularly when the sun is on them, has found me collecting stacks of leaves with the kids. Having got them all home I then had to [...]
Pin ItNatural Paints
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 [...]
Pin ItSun Prints
Inspired by Suzanne at SkyBlueSea, I decided to have a go at Sun Prints with the kids. The proper name for these is Cyanotypes, and it is a technique first developed in the early days of photography by Sir John Herschel in 1842. In fact they are the original ‘blue-prints’. They’re really simple to do [...]
