Wild about nature – Nature sculptures

Our Wild About Nature activity this time is one you can do any time, anywhere for free – nature sculptures! Using the natural materials all around us, we can make all kinds of shapes and pictures. You could make nature sculptures at home and stick them down then press them to keep them, make them in your garden, or you could even make them outside at the park and leave them to bring a smile to everyone who walks by.

What You’ll Need

Leaves of different shapes, sizes and colours
You can also use stalks and twigs
You can use petals and flowers, but make sure you use flowers that are a bit droopy because picking healthy flowers can be bad for the plant and the animals that need them (if you’re using flowers from your garden, collect the seeds where possible – you could label some and put in our Wild about Sharing boxes)
Look around and experiment – stones, nuts/shells and empty snail shells can all be great materials to make a sculpture with

How to Make Nature Sculptures

The possibilities are endless, and you can always reuse the same materials and move them around to make something else. We made some of our favourite animals using leaves. To help with this you could try looking at pictures of animals online or bring along a book you have with animals in to copy.

You can also make up your own species of animal by playing around with different shapes. Then come up with a name for the animal. Where would your animal live? What would it eat and what would it like to do?

For a more abstract sculpture you can make different patterns out of natural objects. You could use them to spell out your name or a nice message for people who will walk by your sculpture.

Once you’ve made something (or several things) you’re happy with, you can take a photo so you’ll remember what it looked like and show other people. The great thing about making these is that you can leave them where you made them so other people might see them.

Take a look at some more of our sculptures to get some ideas:

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