The playground is a great place to create land art with the children. Not all schools have access to natural materials. Bring the materials into school to create land art in the playground. Lots of parks have materials such as fircones, sticks, stones, acorns and conkers when in season, fallen leaves. We collected these lovely fircones from the park and brought them into school, we are always on the lookout for amazing nature to use in land art.  

• 

We have been making stone faces, they are great fun to create. I am going to set myself a challenge of making a stone face family. The couple holding hands are George and Beatrice and the chap underneath is called Bill. More family to arrive very soon! Take the kids out to a rocky place and get them to create their family and friends! 

Grass Diamond

This day I attempted the grass diamond I was suffering from a bad back!!

We went out collecting our natural materials for our sculptures,  I'd had the idea for the grass diamond sculpture for a while.

After collecting dried grass stalks and fresh green stalks, I set about making the sculpture, using thorns to attach each ends.

It was extremely fiddly and getting all the right sizes was frustrating. The pain in my back wasn't helping at all. :-(

Eventually,  and I'm probably talking a couple of hours, I asked Richard for help!! Which in my mind is a fail on my part.

But, Richard did a great job in finishing the sculpture for me. I chose where it should sit and Richard with his expert photography skills took the photo.

A good team effort, and although not all my own work it shows what you can achieve with a bit of help!

Recently, Richard was asked to write a blog piece for the WildlifeTrusts 'EveryChildWild' their aim is to encourage every child from small infant to young adult to want and to have every opportunity to explore nature and wildlife.

Here is their blog:

http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/news/2015/11/03/every-child-wild-making-nature-part-growing-all-children

Here is the blog piece Richard wrote for the wildlifetrust blog.

http://www.wildlifetrusts.org/blog/everychildwild/2015/11/09/richard-shilling-every-child-wild

Encouraging everyone to appreciate nature and wildlife should be a priority in education and family life.

Mud Animals

It has been a long while since adding anything at all to the landartforkids blog, but this is about to change!! Richard has been updating his own website along with land art for kids, but these things do take a while when you are doing it yourself! Luckily Richard has these skills as well as land art and photography.

I will try and post as often as I can. I always try and post something on the land art for kids facebook page most days.

Here are some pictures of something I made in the summer, it is purely for the children to have a go at, and grown ups too of course! :-)

I collected some really lovely sticky mud, (kids love mud) the best mud around in these parts!!! Then I used the stems from Maple leaves, and the eyes are leaves made into circles, an acorn for the rabbits tail, voila, mud animals!!

New Calendar for 2013 and Blurb Christmas discounts

My calendar for 2013 has finally arrived! 18 months ago a publisher asked me if they could put one together using my images, I was chuffed to bits and to now have one in my greasy mitts, well how cool!

Amber Lotus Publishing are a lovely fluffy company based in Portland, Oregan and they were an absolute pleasure to deal with, I had great fun sorting out the images for them and lots of excitement anticipating what it may look like. And finally it arrived the other day!

Larger than I thought, think of a vinyl album cover (though sadly it doesn't play a tune when you slap it onto a record player but it might ruin your stylus) and printed on dolphin/tuna/donkey sanctuary/hedgehog friendly paper. I can only imagine how many wonderful forests have been planted just to offset the printing of this calendar. I am expecting a massive kick back from the squirrels. They now owe me big time...

I have a few knocking around should you want one (that'll be you people with Paypal accounts and not any squirrels even if you have a PaySquirrel account), about £8 each give or take shipping and where you live in the world, drop me a line if you want one, there's a contact whatchamacallit on my website. You can get them on Amazon too should that mean you can get one cheaper wherever you are. They don't ship to squirrel land so take note nut munchers. You can get them plenty of other places too apparently but you'll probably know better than me about that.

Oh and finally should you want a book for Chrimble, Blurb are knocking £7 off until 13 December, just enter SAVE7 at checkout. If you squirrels want one then you'd better ask Blurb if it is alright to pay in hazelnuts.

Autumn Land Art

Autumn Land Art, a photo by JRT Pickle on Flickr.

A wonderful warm autumn afternoon in late September, I collected maple leaves and pinned them together with thorns. I found an amazing rock with beautiful green moss and afternoon shadows, a perfect spot for land art!