Make the most of your outdoor time by collecting some materials together for a painting session later - using paints that you make yourselves with nature's offerings! Sarah and Sam used an autumn walk to collect berries, mud, grass and yellow flowers and had great fun painting with their home-made natural paints.
Making Natural Paints
Experiment with what you find when you are out and about! For our natural paints we used:
Berries:
Mush up some berries with water. Make sure you use non-toxic berries. We used blackberries for purple.
Rosehips:
We used rosehips for red. Soak the rosehips in boiling water for a couple of hours to soften first and remove the seeds.
Mud:
We had great fun stirring warm water into some dry mud to make brown paint!
Grass and leaves:
We soaked grass in boiling water over night, and strained the next morning, for green. You can also rub some leaves directly onto paper, but make sure you don't use any with irritating sap.
Flowers:
We rubbed dandelions onto the paper for our yellow colour. You could experiement with different non-toxic flowers. We found that mixing petals with water tended to result in too murky a colour!
Here is Sam filling in the outline of an apple which Sarah drew for him
Sam's finished apple painting. He used berry paint for the apple and mud paint for the stalk.
Sam also painted an autumn tree with natural paint. He used mud paint for the trunk and branches, berry and rosehip paint for the leaves, and dandelion for the sun. He also used grass paint but you can see that the colour faded before we took the photo.
