Hammered Flower Art

Hammered flower art can be both fun and beautiful.  I’ve seen some gorgeous prints in person and online so I decided to try it out with my girls.

Here’s what you’ll need if you want to try it with your kids:

• variety of flowers and/or leaves
• paper (plain paper will work but not as well as construction, watercolor, or other more absorbent paper)
• hammer
• hard surface to work on such as a cutting board or piece of wood (you are going to be hammering on it)
• paper towels
• scissors
• tape (optional)

1) Find flowers and leaves.  Walk around your yard or neighborhood and look for brightly colored flowers and leaves.  They need to be fresh but not overly moist.  Try a variety of things because some will work better than others.  Of note, pale yellow and white flowers do not work!

2)  Put your paper on your hard surface.  Then put the flower on the paper.  Spread the flower out and cut off the mushy/moist part that sticks up in the center.  Some flowers you might have to cut the petals apart a little more to make them spread flatter and get a better distinction between the petals on the paper.

3)  Put your paper towel on top of your flower then hammer over your flower.  You’ll see some color bleed through the paper towel.  Make sure to hammer over your entire flower and to watch your kids’ hands so they don’t hammer their fingers!  You may want to tape your paper towel down so that your kids don’t have to hold on to it.

4)  Pull up the paper towel every now and then to check that you’ve hammered over the entire flower.

5)  When you are done hammering, pull the paper towel off.  If pieces of flower stick to your paper, let them dry then brush them off.

6)  Sit back and enjoy your art!

Some notes:

• As you can see, we had to improvise on our hammers.  Hubby had all our hammers with him at work!
• Though the first photo is really nice (I did that one), my girls’ prints actually turned out like this: