I recently saw a wonderful post on Coffee Cups and Crayons: Leaf Chalk Art. They have the same problem we have – a lack of fall leaves! This inspired them to paint leaves with chalk markers. So beautiful!
On our next walk, we found some nice fresh leaves and broke out our tempera and acrylic paint immediately when we came home.
This Painting Leaves art activity was so simple and fun and had beautiful results!
This post contains affiliate links for your convenience.
Materials for Painting Leaves
- Fresh leaves.
- Tempera paint and/or acrylic paint.
- Tray, cookie sheet or similar to work on.
- Something to hold the paint. We like paper plates when there’s a lot of different colors and/or only a small amount of each color. For fewer colors, we often use muffin tins or apple sauce cups.
E picked out all the colors she liked from our tempera and acrylic paints and squeezed a small amount of each onto a paper plate. She chose her favorite leaf and got to work.
She really enjoyed the unusual painting surface and painted one leaf after the other. She was so proud of her artwork!
I painted one leaf myself in between trying to keep N from pulling down the tablecloth, and since I decided to use dots in my design, E gave it a try herself. She soon chose to paint over them again, though 😉
While all this fun was going on,
N figured out how to climb up on a chair which gives him access to the tabletop… There go my quiet moments 😉
E would’ve happily kept painting more leaves if we hadn’t already been late for dinner.
I was thinking about possibly trying to laminate the painted leaves to preserve them but didn’t follow through. As they were, the leaves predictably dried out within a day or two, and the paint started flaking off, so unless you take extra steps to preserve them, keep in mind that this is definitely process art. Enjoy it while it lasts 🙂