Fall'n in Love With Leaf Printing

This week my 3rd and 4th grade students kicked off the first week of Fall by making leaf prints!! These leaves came off a sycamore tree and have a sort of fuzz on the back that soaks up the watercolors and allows them to blend beautifully! 

I let them paint it however they wanted. This student painted the sky on hers and asked me to take a picture of the leaf  against the sky to see the camouflage effect! 

We used the crayola 16 color box which is my absolute fav right now! 

 We tried it with other leaves too

Students learned about craftsmanship and we talked about keeping their paper background nice and clean without smudges.  

 My younger grades made crayon resist paintings and leaf rubbings with multiple colors. We are ready for Fall and cooloer temps in Houston!

Creative Inspiration

I am always saying that Art is an emergent curriculum in my class. This morning a student came in with the beautiful Fall leaves Poinsettia that you see below and a Fall leaves Christmas tree she had made at home. It immediately got the kids VERY excited and INSPIRED!!!

When they get this way, it means lesson plans go out the window and we direct the class towards the inspired ideas of the students! We went outside and collected handfuls of beautiful leaves and they went to town!! Everything in these artworks is made out of leaves with a few crayon embellishments

I don't usually do "Christmas" projects in November, but that is where their little creative minds lead them, so some of their artworks were adorned with holiday decor!

Fall Leaves Crayon Resist Paintings

Every Year I do some kind of project with Fall leaves. This year I went for the simple, but beautiful crayon resist paintings with my favorite liquid watercolors!

First we watched a video and talked about Fall. Then we put together a Fall Leaves Color Wheel so the kids could see the intermediate colors as they gradually change!

Here's a short video with LOTS of BeAuTiFuL Fall Leaves Images that we watched

Then they drew their leaves with crayons. Make sure your students press very hard with the crayons to make the crayon resist. They used yellow and light green to make their leaf drawings. We made sure to look at EVERY tiny line and detail and draw them just as they are.

I gave them only 4 colors of liquid watercolor; red,orange,yellow,and green

IF the leaves had spots, broken edges or holes, we drew those too. I LOVE the leaves that have ALL the fall colors in them from green, yellow-green, yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, and red!!

They had the option to add a background, but if their leaves were really bright, their background needed to have some brown and dull colors, to make the leaves POP

We also used OVERLAPPING in our Fall foliage