Autumn is a wonderful time to do lessons on the concept of change. I collected lots of fallen leaves for the students to look at to talk about the colours, shape, lines and texture- a lesson on art elements in one leaf!

For this activity we collected Plane Tree leaves (there is a Plane Tree right outside the artroom) as they have good veins for rubbing and printing. You can any leaves, and a variety of different prints would be interesting.

Students placed a leaf under their paper and were shown how to hold the leaf and paper down whilst rubbing with the edge of the crayon from the stem outwards along all the veins. We used metallic crayons.

Food dye wash in warm colours was then used to brush over the rubbings to create a resist of the crayon leaf.

The next lesson, students were tracing leaf shapes for a new project while small groups came to do their leaf print. They chose either brown or black for the print, rolled paint over the more textured side, placed in on clean newspaper and popped their background on top. They rubbed smoothly and firmly over the top, making sure to press along each vein and around the edges of the leaf, before lifting their paper to reveal the print.