Create a "Nature Rubbing" Collage

It's been a long winter around here and my children are itching for some outdoor activities that don't have anything to do with sledding, skiing or building something out of snow. Yes, all of that is fun, but this winter got off to a late start this year and we're all ready for it to be over with.

Because we can't reconnect with nature through planting our vegetable garden, flower beds and other landscaping yet, we're going to reconnect with nature through art projects. This one is all about rubbing!

Last fall, my children came home with many pieces of art from school centered around leaf rubbing. We're going to revisit that art project this spring, but take it a bit further. We're going to rub:

1: more leaves
2: bark
3: small branch patterns
4: large rock textures
5: the gravel in the driveway

We're going to use a wide variety of supplies, including chalks, pastels, crayons, soft pencils and paint on the tips of our fingers. These projects won't be limited to spring colors, either. We'll be experimenting with layering colors and using as many different colors as possible for each rubbing we work on.

We'll also be layering textures to see how they work together in a composition and how difficult (or easy) it might be to guess where the rubbings came from later. We've talked about creating multi-media rubbings involving a crayon rubbing for the leaves, a soft pencil rubbing for the small branch patterns and a paint rubbing covering the entire thing from the gravel pattern. (Any combination of media and rubbing textures can be combined for this mixed media project.)

The kind of paper you choose for this project is completely up to you, but it's recommended that something that isn't too thick be used. However, don't use paper that's too flimsy, either. We've used multi-purpose copier paper in the past for similar projects very successfully. We've tried construction paper and it worked fine for some things, but not for others. The same was true for the drawing paper we selected.

Here are some more ideas you can use when your rubbings are complete:
1: cut them into "die cut" style shapes and use them on greeting cards
2: use them for book covers on handmade books
3: create handmade envelopes out of them
4: cut them into interesting or abstract shapes for collage work
5: cut the leaves into their actual shapes and create a mobile

There are countless opportunities for these projects and, because you're gathering these rubbings right from your own backyard, they can be done over and over again when they're used up.