Making collages, or the arranging and pasting of a variety of materials, has always been a love of mine and it is becoming a favorite of my daughters too.

Collages can be made with paper scraps, stickers, fabric, buttons, cardboard, tape, 3-D objects, nature items, or any found material. The possibilities are endless and the act of gluing and arranging the materials is a great process for children.

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As we entered October, my girls and I wanted to make a Fall Collage and like some of our past projects, we love looking at books to get our creative juices flowing. One of my favorite books, Outside your Window: A First Book of Nature by Nicola Davies, has beautiful collage illustrations and covers everything from different seasons, to compost, to insects and animals.

The images in the book inspired us to explore our environment for items in nature to use for our collage.

With the foliage finally changing from summer to fall, we went for a hike down the street to see what we could collect. The girls and I really enjoy doing that and love finding a variety of treasures in different shapes, sizes, and color as the seasons change.

We used our nature findings to create the background of our collage and gathered up a few more supplies. See our steps and materials below for these Fall Crow Collages.

Materials:

• Inspo- The book, Outside Your Window: A First Book Of Nature
• Printed bird images from the book
• Nature (free!)- a variety of leaves in different shapes and sizes, acorns, sticks. We also used straw from our chicken coop!
• Sturdy cardboard (another freebie!)
• Found papers and recycled items such as packaging material and produce mesh
• Tempera paint
• Glue

Step 1-

Collaging is all about layers so we started by painting the background of a piece of sturdy cardboard with our tempera paint. We then chose some leaves from our walk, painted them, and printed them onto our cardboard. Little ones are so fascinated by this stamping technique!

Step 2-

I set out a couple of trays with some of our other nature finds (sticks, acorns), some cool paper packing material (that we also used for our mixed media owl project), some black produce mesh, and we even pulled some straw from our chicken coop!

I  skimmed through the book and found some interesting images of birds, specifically crows, so I scanned them and made a couple copies of each for the girls to choose from.

They chose their crow and began cutting them out (I helped Willa, 2, with this step).

Step 3-

The next was assembling!

They glued their crow down and began adding the other materials down around the background. We also added some extra wing detail with the mesh and packaging material on top of our printed crow image.

Our finished Fall Crow Collages:

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Looking for more collage ideas? Check out our Monochromatic Collage: Green Study, Nature Shadow Boxes, or our Gee’s Bend Inspired Quilts.