Painting with Natural Materials

My boys love to paint and I try to change up our painting time by letting them explore different materials. Yesterday we collected some leaves and flower stems from our backyard and I thought it would be fun to use them as paint brushes.

Set up your workspace I use an old crib sheet to cover our table but newspaper works too. The materials we used were washable paint, glitter glue, found nature items, plastic lids to hold the paint and clothes pins to clip the leaves (this is optional). You will also need some paper to paint on- we used newspaper this time because I am going to save the paintings to use to wrap small presents and we are getting low on construction paper.

Invite your little artists to the table. I let them pick two colors of paint and asked them if they wanted to add glitter glue. Both boys looked at the table and asked for paint brushes so I added those too.

They were a little hesitant to use the natural materials at first and they were telling me- 

"Mommy you silly you paint with brushes!". I told them I just wanted them to have fun and they could use the brushes or the other items. Then I showed them some ways to use the pine cones and leaves to paint.

 Trying out using a clothes pin clipped on an autumn joy flower to paint with.

Now with the little guy our painting projects almost always turn in to finger painting which is why we paint before bath time!