Take a walk around your neighborhood and collect flowers to create pressed flower artwork.

Pressed flower art – consists of drying flower petals and leaves in a flower press to flatten and exclude light and moisture. Pressing flowers makes them appear flat, and can also fade or increase the vibrancy of their color. The flowers are placed on a flat surface like paper, glass, cardboard, canvas, etc. Pressed flowers could also be categorized as earth art.

Instructions:

Step 1: With a parent or guardian’s permission, take a walk around your backyard, or in your neighborhood. Explore the environment around you. Collect any flowers, leaves and other natural elements that you’d like to use in your artwork. 

Step 2: Find a place in your home to lay out the flowers that you collected. Experiment with different arrangements of flowers. It is okay to think outside of the box. You could arrange the flowers to make an abstract design, a relief sculpture or anything you feel is a good design. 

Step 3: With the help of a parent or guardian, grab a paper towel, fold the flowers into the paper towel, and flatten the flowers with something heavy like a book for about 10 minutes. 

Step 4: Once you have finished pressing the flowers, arrange your flowers on a blank piece of paper. You can glue the flowers down if you would like to keep your pressed flower art and put it in a picture frame. 

Vocabulary

Earth art – a style of art originated in the 1960s and 1970s that uses nature or land as its materials in order to show the connection between humans and the environment.

Pressed flower art – consists of drying flower petals and leaves in a flower press to flatten and exclude light and moisture. 

Relief – is a sculptural technique where the sculpted elements remain attached to a solid background of the same material.

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