Nature Shadow Boxes Part 2!

One of my first blog posts on The Art Garden was this Nature Shadow Box Assemblage. It was a fun art, nature, and sensory experience that my girls and I really enjoyed.

We decided to come back to this activity when we had some dying flowers in our garden and some wilted store-bought flowers. We made some changes to our process this time, however, and glammed these shadow boxes up a bit with sequins and glitter!

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Here are the materials we used this go-around:

Small cardboard lids (such as a kids shoe box lid)
Tempera
Glue (I like having the big gallon of glue on hand for these kind of projects)
Nature items (flowers, twigs, leaves, seasonal items)
Sequins
Glitter
Misc. materials such as bits of lace, twine, or yarn

Here is what we did:

Step 1-

Paint the inside of your shoe box with tempera. Keep the design simple because the paint will get covered later…keep scrolling to see what happens!

Step 2-

Pour a generous layer of glue into your box.

Step 3-

Gather your nature items and arrange them in the glue. Add the other elements such as lace, yarn, sequins, and glitter.

See my little Willa below in action! Gluing and sticking is her favorite pastime!

*A few notes:

These take several days to dry, depending on how much glue is used.
As the glue dries, the paint will bleed into the glue, changing the whole look of the box! It is fun to watch and the color looks so beautiful against the nature items.
We also drizzled a little glue on top of our flowers and nature items to preserve them a little and keep them from browning too much.

Here are our finished shadow boxes. See how the glue is now colored?