Try these fun nature art ideas for young children. Paint with mud, create a nature weaving or make petal playdough!
Updated March 2025
Nature is one of the best tools we have for teaching and entertaining our little ones—it’s all around us, free, and full of possibilities! With a little creativity, we can turn simple outdoor finds into fun and meaningful art experiences.
Today, I’m sharing five of my favorite ways to use nature in art. These ideas are easy, fun, and a great way to get kids exploring the outdoors. I hope this inspires you to head outside, get creative, and enjoy the beauty of nature with your little ones!
Nature Art Ideas
1. Mud Prints
This one is completely free and super easy to set up. I simply collected a range of stems with either leaves or flowers at the end to act as a paintbrush. Use either regular paint (or mud paint!) and your little ones will have a blast creating prints, marks, shapes or pictures with each natural brush.
Recipe for Mud Paint:
- 1 part soil (any type will do)
- 1 part water
- 1 part white glue (do not add if you want the mud paint to wash off)
2. Leaf Prints
Have you ever thought about how beautiful a leaf could look? Leaf printing give you the chance to see!
We collected a variety of leaves from the garden, painted the backs of them and printed them onto plain paper. Less paint is more in this case, especially if you want to showcase all of the amazing veins running through the leaves.
3. Petal Playdough
I love making homemade playdough because of all the ways I can adapt it to suit our interests.
You can use petals gathered from the yard or from bouquets and use them in your playdough.
There are a few ways that you can incorporate petals into your dough:
- Blitz the petals up with one cup of hot water to change the color of the water to create a natural dye.
- Tear the petals and add them to a plain batch of playdough.
- Do both!
You can do this with grass cuttings, turmeric, lavender, sand and more.
The recipe that I always use is as follows.
Mix together and knead:
- 1 cup of flour (any flour)
- 1 teaspoon of cream of tarter
- 1/3 cup of salt
- 1 tablespoon of oil (any oil)
- 1 cup of freshly boiled water
Pro tips: If I am adding petals or leaves, I don’t normally have to adapt the recipe, I will just knead it in at the end. And if I add in a liquid, depending on the amount, I may add less water.
4. Leaf Insects
This is great activity to learn about the different parts of a butterfly. My kids collected two larger leaves and two smaller leaves for the butterfly’s wings, plus some little sticks for the body and antenna. We used white glue to stick each body part to a piece of card and left it to dry for at least an hour.
There are so many possible variations with this activity. Why not adapt it to your little one’s interests? My dinosaur crazy little boy would love to create a brontosaurus.
5. Fine Motor Nature Weave
Choose your shape then draw and cut it out of an old piece of cardboard or recycled cereal box. I tied elastic bands around our little hedgehog, but string would work just fine.
Fine motor activities are great for developing and strengthening those smaller finger movements which will help your little ones when they are ready to start writing.
I hope that I provided you with some simple, easy and relatively cheap (if not free) nature based art ideas to try with your children.
More Nature Art for Kids
- 5 Nature Based Play Ideas for Toddlers & Preschoolers
- 16 Garden and Nature Crafts for Kids
- 13 Nature Walk Ideas (+ FREE Scavenger Hunt Printable)
- 22 Nature Art Ideas for Kids
- How to Make a Nature Collage for Kids
- Two Nature Inspired Art Activities for Kids
Pin It For Later
