Autumn Leaves- easy home school lesson!

Autumn Leaves – pastel & food dye wash

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions we are still allowed to leave our home to exercise, so whilst out for a walk I collected some varied shape Autumn leaves from the ground and used them to create a simple artwork suitable for any primary school age child. I had done this lesson previously with Year 1’s and 2’s, shown further down in student examples.

Choose 4-6 leaves of varied shape to arrange on your paper. Once happy with the arrangement, trace around each leaf with a grey lead pencil. Use oil pastels in warm colours to trace each leaf, and use the leaves as reference to draw the veins on them.

Colour each leaf with pastels, using the colours of the real leaf if it’s not just brown! Then use your finger to smudge and blend the colours.

Once all the leaves have been coloured and blended, trace around the outline again and go over the veins of the leaves. Now time for the food dye background! You can buy food colouring from the supermarket. Use the COOL colours- which will be green and blue; I tried mixing purple with red and blue, but it turned out a little murky! Mix a few drops of food colouring with a little water and “paint” the background in dabs of each colour.

Artworks are by Year One & Two students:

Autumn Texture Trees- Foundation to Year 1 Art lesson

Foundation (Prep) students loved experimenting with the effects of texture wands and implements before choosing one to create the Autumn leaves on their textured tree.

These artworks took three lessons (though they could be done in two), but there were great art concepts for learning the elements of art along the way. One element was texture – the bark of the tree and the leaves themselves. The other element we looked at was colour, and specifically warm colours.

The full lesson plan with learning intentions, step by step activities, resources, and alignment to the FOUNDATION Victorian curriculum, and student examples is available in a Word Document.