Now that summer is coming to an end (sniff — I’m kind of in denial — you?), it’s a good time to harvest some of your last blooms for some flower-painting experiments.
We took a walk around the neighborhood and picked some weeds from wild roadside gardens, and also selected a handful of flowers and leaves from our own yard.
Materials
For this project you’ll need: assorted flowers and leaves and paper
The experiment lies in testing the flowers to see what colors actually emerge from them as they’re crushed and smeared onto paper. We were surprised by the blue hydrangea’s brownish-green hue, but also got some more predictable amazingly brilliant yellows and purples from our roses and dandelions.
More Artsy Science Experiments
If you’re interested in more experiments that lie at the intersection of art and science, you might also enjoy Invisible Ink: A Citrus Painting Experiment and the Egg Geodes Science Experiment.
More Flower Projects
For more with flowers, you’ll have a lot of fun Pounding them into Flower Bookmarks or maybe you want to learn how to press flowers. Zina at Let’s Lasso the Moon has a lovely idea for turning a huge sunflower harvest into back-to-school teacher gifts. And, there are over SIXTY amazing ideas in the Tinkerlab Flower Creative Challenge that will keep you busy with all your harvested flowers.
And similarly, here are some ideas for making vegetable-based egg dyes.
Love this idea, Rachelle! We picked flowers on our walk today. I’m thinking we’ll try this and see what colors we get.
Sadly, we’ve had too much of a drought to have many flowers this year, but the rains have returned, so perhaps some of the autumn blooms will be bright and plentiful enough to use.