Leaf rubbing and paint mural

Lots of lovely leaves around to make beautiful decorations with! Whooo!

This activity was really easy and I always like the art activities where kids can work on one thing collaboratively. Especially something that is all about the process and not how well you can draw etc, so the three year olds were able to contribute just as much as the five year olds and you can't even tell which bits of the art work were done by which kids. It's just one lovely mural that they all had a hand in producing.

I used painters tape to stick a big strip of butchers block paper to the kitchen floor. I used regular packing tape a while back and had to resort to scrubbing the floor with isopropyl alchohol to get it off, which I wasn't expecting. Here's my older daughter helping me to cut bits of tape.

One that was done, the kids positioned the leaves with the veins facing up. We took our time and arranged them so they filled the paper, then rolled over another layer of the butcher block paper and taped that down too.



A few days ago we made some autumn coloured crayon cakes. Crayon cakes are ace, we've been making them ever since the girls were teeny, because they are so much easier for littlies to get a grip on when they start learning to make marks on paper. They are even better for leaf rubbing!

I haven't done a post on crayon cakes, because I'm sure there are lots out there already. Here's a good one from WhiMSey Love.

The kids had at the paper with the crayons for about 20 minutes, all haphazard with the different colours. The shapes of the tiled floor came through in the rubbings too, but it's not that distracting.









The leaf rubbings were rather pretty just on thier own, but I figured we could get another 20 minutes or so out of this activity, if I watered down some food colouring and let them paint over the rubbings to get a wax resist effect. They thought this was really cool, especially when the yellow rubbings showed through the darker food colouring.








We ended up with what I think are quite wonderful textures and colours. Here are a few close up pics to show you what I mean.











And here is our fall mural proudly in place in the kitchen. I thought about making it into a poster with "happpy thanksgiving" written on it, but really I don't want to cover up any of the leaf rubbings with text, so we'll make a separate banner and enjoy the mural as it is.