Foraged Art

On Monday, we talked about how temporary beauty isn’t wasteful because the moment itself has a lasting impact. The process is powerful.

Foraged art is a great example of that! Whether you have access to gorgeous flowers or just a little grass and twigs, you can have a lot of fun making something beautiful, even if it only sticks around for a moment before everything wilts. (You could also always use a wilting bouquet!)

Art that only lasts for a short amount of time is called ephemeral art, and you’ll find yourself quite inspired by searching on Google images or finding specific artists such as the legendary Andy Goldsworthy or others mentioned below.

All you have to do to make foraged art is responsibly gather natural items and arrange them in a beautiful way, maybe on white paper. For easiest cleanup, you’ll want to do this activity outside if possible. As you’ll see, this is a fun and enriching activity for all ages!

My kids and I were inspired particularly by Flora Forager. Check out these girls in dresses made by my daughter:

Can’t go wrong with a rainbow, if you have access to those colors!

Irises made a very easy and lovely butterfly ⬇️

It’s soothing to simply make a circular, repeating pattern of arrangements, like Kathy Klein’s mandalas. Here’s our attempt ⬇️

Simply arranging loose parts in nature looks beautiful, too; check out the work of Ja Soon Kim! This was the perfect activity for our 4-year-old ⬇️

Something that got my 11-year-old son involved is I made it a contest: $2 for the best artwork. He swiftly made a cat, whiskers and all…and won the contest!

You can make words, too, especially with blades of grass ⬇️

If you’re really serious about making fine details, you can use scissors to trim your materials to your liking and tweezers to arrange things carefully, as my sister-in-law did with this peacock ⬇️

Even a toddler boy can find himself ripping flowers and leaves to shreds. It feels wasteful, but flowers are meant to be fade. Enjoy the moment.

Hopefully this gave you some good ideas! As always, I would love to see pictures of what you came up with in your family! You can reply to this email, send them to family.scripts.info@gmail.com, or tag @familyscripts on Instagram.

Enjoy! Have a great weekend!

Warmly,

Hope from Family Scripts