by Nick Neddo
Quarry Books, 2020
Paint made from stones, charcoal crayons, and animal-fur paintbrushes – The Organic Artist for Kids will tell you how to create and use all of these and more. The book invites kids and adults to explore how our ancestors would have made art before the age of the craft store. Along the way, it becomes a tutorial in building tangible and personal connections with local environments.
The Organic Artist for Kids is an activity book for making homemade art materials from foraged and found items. It includes 38 projects across 10 categories, from brushes to inks to land art. The projects range in accessibility, as indicated by a three-oak-leaf rating system. The book is comprehensively illustrated with both step-by-step photographs and the author’s own artwork. The text is engagingly written and sprinkled with kid-friendly silliness, such as this line from the directions for egg tempera, “Find a chicken. Okay, we can skip ahead a little.”
The projects in this book range widely in time and commitment. An example of a simple project is the “berry splat print” from project 25, which is exactly what it sounds like: berries splatted between paper. What kid couldn’t get into that? On the other end of the spectrum is “acorn ink” from project 18, with multiple preparation steps, including grinding, boiling, and filtering, as well as adding pre-prepared “rust juice.”
Many of the activities aren’t traditional art projects, but rather focus on making art materials to use in later projects. It’s easy to disregard a purchased paintbrush as a disposable tool, but a handcrafted paintbrush can be a work of art itself. By starting art making with materials-making, the materials themselves become an art project. While the book is nominally aimed at kids, its true target audience is adult mentors. Neddo explains in his introduction that the book should be used as a guide for adults to lead kids in nature exploration and outdoor skills. Many of the activities in the book are labor or time intensive – good opportunities to role-model patience and persistence, in addition to a do-it-yourself attitude.
With its wide range of projects, whether you have lots of experience with nature awareness and primitive skills or are just starting out, you will find something new to try. Many of the projects are challenging enough to engage an adult, so go ahead and re-connect with your inner kid!