To introduce your baby to classic nursery rhyme characters, you can try painting some of them on the walls of the nursery. Pictures like Mother Goose, as well as images from rhymes like "Hickory Dickory Dock" (a mouse and a clock) or "Hey Diddle, Diddle" (a dish, a spoon, and/or a cat with a fiddle) will make the nursery space come alive. You may also want to paint some of the phrases from popular nursery rhymes on the walls, along with their corresponding pictures. For example, if you're using yellow or white for the baby nursery, you can use lines from the "Five Little Ducks" nursery rhymes, such as "Five little ducks went out to play," and feature the words around a small crowd of ducklings.
Large baby blocks provide a wonderful art activity for the nursery that you can complete yourself or with your toddler. Large Styrofoam or wooden blocks can be painted in the colors you have chosen for the nursery, and you can decorate each side of the block with letters of your child's name or with numbers. The blocks can also serve as chairs for a child-sized table, or you can create a three-sided baby block and use the open side for additional storage space. Your toddler can also use finger paints to decorate the sides of the baby blocks, or you can allow your little one to dip his hands or feet in paint so the blocks can be accented with your toddler's original footprints and hand prints.
Adding plastic flowers or jeweled accents to the nursery furniture is a fun art activity that you can complete yourself, and you can update the art project once your baby is old enough to decorate the room with you. Adding flowers to the edges of the crib (in an area in which your baby can't tear them off) will give the nursery a sweet and delicate look. You can add flower petals in bright colors to the table in your child's nursery, and cover the flower design by mounting a sturdy piece of glass over the table to create a new tabletop. Painting the chairs, crib, table, and shelves in an original color combination will make your baby's furniture especially unique, and hot gluing jewels to the head of the chairs or corners of the table will provide a whimsical look that will make your little one's nursery more appealing.