May 10 // Foraged & Ephemeral Art

making beautiful, temporary things

Yesterday 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’s only for a moment.

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. We laid out a sheet to simplify cleanup. As you’ll see, this is a fun and enriching activity for all ages!

We were inspired particularly by Flora Forager. Here’s a gorgeous girl in a dress made by our 8-year-old ⬇️

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 ⬇️

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 we 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, we 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 message them to @family.scripts on Insta!

Act of Thoughtfulness: Make Something Beautiful for Someone Else

Creativity is often made all the better when it doesn’t end with you. Is there a way you can make something beautiful for someone? Even if you’re just learning calligraphy or your poems don’t rhyme or your kids’ watercolors are just reckless blobs, isn’t there someone who would love to receive something from your brain, hands, and heart?

As a reminder, here are some prompts you can try this week to get the creative juices flowing!

Some alternative prompts are Bagel, Sun, Caterpillar, Ice Cream, Vacation, Shoes, Grapes, and Christmas. Super random, but you never know what might spark something 😅

Have fun creating!

Warmly,

Hope and the Family Scripts team