Nature “Selfies” Art Project

Fall is the perfect time to reflect on the growing season and have children work with the bounty of the garden and school-yard! Nature crafts and art project ideas that are inspired by the Fall season are plentiful. A nature selfie art project is one of my favourites that gets kids exploring the garden in the fall!

The inspiration for this project comes from a series of portraits called Feast for the Eyes by Giuseppe Arcimboldo:

Start with a sturdy piece of paper, card stock or manilla tag. Draw a loopy line all over the paper, like this:

Then use chalk pastels to fill in the loops. It looks best if each colour is apart from itself and not touching a connecting line between the loops. Colour in the lines and then use your finger or a tissue to smudge the chalk pastel for a softer result:

The final product looks best if it is fully coloured, so go ahead and fill those loops! The nature selfie looks pretty lonely on the page without some sort of back ground, so even though Giuseppe Arcimboldo didn’t use this background, I’m using one to give the final project a little more life!

Then go out to your garden and collect interesting bits a pieces that you can use to build your nature selfie! Twigs, leaves, berries and seeds all help create an image in the style of Giuseppe Arcimboldo. I try to focus the children on collecting what nature has already discarded and not pulling parts of plants off the parent plant. If there are items like berries or leaves or seed pods that children would like to harvest, this presents a good opportunity to teach sustainable harvesting.

Another easy and fun way to create a nature selfie is to simply go outside and collect nature’s treasures. In this project we used wood cookies and loose bits we collected to represent our feeling sin the garden!

If you’d like more inspiration, be sure to follow my Nature Inspired Arts and Crafts board on Pinterest: