Winter Leaves

Three ways with Winter Leaves

To celebrate the wintery leaves that are laying around in the garden, I thought we could explore three fun simple art projects.. Leaves come in all shapes and sizes, a short walk around your neighbourhood with undoubtedly offer a range of shapes and colours to work with. The following activities are quick and should suit a range of ages. 

Leaf rubbings:

This is a classic but highly effective application of Frottage. Coloured crayons are used to capture the outlines, veins, and textures of the leaves. Layer one sheet of white cartridge paper over your leaf, and using a coloured crayon gently colour over the top of it. You may get a better effect from using the side of the crayon, do some experimenting. I chose to use Autumn coloured crayons for this project. This can make great collage material, or just an artwork in itself. 

Leaf bugs:

Using a gluestick or PVA, glue your leaves down onto white card. Lay these upside-down and put a book on top to give it some pressure while it dries. 

Using a thin black pen, draw in your bugs body, legs, head, antennae, and any other buggy details. Encourage the kids to consider the characteristics of an exoskeleton. Add colour with textas or I used coloured pencils. 

Mobile:

This is a very simple mobile, using just your leaves, some paint markers, and some string. Spend some time decorating your leaves, at least on one side, maybe two sides, with stripes, spots, zigs zags etc. The string will need to be threaded through the leaves near the stem, I used a thick needle that I could get the thread through, but you might need to just holepunch a hole and thread your string into the leaf. To get my leaves to stay in one place on the string I created a loop by wrapping the string back through the hole. Continue to thread your leaves on until you have completed your long strand, and finish with a hanging loop. 

Lets get the kids out of the classroom, or out of their bedrooms, away from that pesky technology – and exploring nature!

A great way to combine art and nature!

Until next time,

Tracy x