Painting Feathers: Nature Process Art Idea

Whilst we love all sorts of creative expression in our house, we do especially love creating with natural materials that we’ve found or foraged. (Isn’t foraged such an awesome word!)

We tend to collect a multitude of feathers as we go about our days, most of which end up in our nature collection at home. We decided to use some of these feathers to create some painted feather process art.

We used our paint pens (aff link) which are great for small projects like this, where you want the vibrancy of acrylic paint, whilst being able to add the finer detail that you can achieve with a pen. Regular acrylic paint and a paint brush would be fun too, but would just create a more splodged look.

The two long black and white feathers are magpie feathers. The other two I’m not so sure – perhaps the shorter black and white one is from a juvenille magpie. We found the tan and white feather at Churchill Island Heritage Farm, which we visited when we travelled to Phillip Island. I think it’s from one of the chickens they have there!

At my four year old daughter Bee’s request, we worked collaboratively on the two larger feathers, taking turns at adding stripes and dots (although she did more directing than turn taking). Once she felt confident enough in the process, she decorated the smaller two feathers all by herself.

It was a good challenge for her to work out how to paint on the feathers, rather than pushing the nib of the paint pen through the feather. She soon realised that she had to monitor how much pressure she applied.

I love using unusual items like this in our process art efforts – I’m hoping that, by sharing these sorts of activities with my kids, I’ll helping them to appreciate that art can be created from all sorts of things!

Incidentally, I love how our painted feathers turned out! No doubt they’ll be used for imaginative play or craft at some point, but for now they just look cute sitting back in our nature collection.

xx Danya

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