Fall Leaf Collage

The Little Leaves

The following art project focused creating a collage with fall leaves. The instructors read “The Little Yellow Leaf” storybook to motivate the students. The story focused on the change of seasons and one or two leaves that refused to let go of the tree on which they grew. We created our fall leaf collage with wax paper and warm colored (red, yellow, orange) crayon shavings and cool colored (blue, green, violet) oil pastels. Here is my leaf art:

Materials needed:

·         3 warm colors crayons and 3 cool color pastels
·         White sheet of paper for each student
·         2 pieces of 11 x 11 wax paper
·         Stencils of different types of leaves
·         Shaving tool

We took the following steps to create our fall leafs:

1.       Shave a crayon (warm colors) with a sharp edged metal file to create shavings for you project.
2.       Fold a piece of 11 x 11 piece of wax paper in half.
3.       After you have a pile of shavings, spread them out on piece of wax paper and fold the paper in half, enclosing the shavings.
4.       Melt the crayons with an iron.
5.       Trace some leaves on the wax paper with the leaf stencils provided and cut them out. (When I did this art it was difficult to trace the leaves on the wax paper because the colors were too thich in some parts and I could not see through to trace the leaves. I actually had to draw them free-hand and they lost their unique natural shape. It would have worked bette if I cut them out from the paper first and then traced them onto the wax paper.)
6.        Paste the leaves you cut out on a piece of paper to create a leaf collage (overlap the leaves).
7.       After pasting the leaves on the piece of paper, use cool colored (blue, green, violet) oil pastels to draw additional leaves onto the paper, creating a collage of warm and cool colored leaves.
8.       Display your artwork.

Extension activity:

This activity could be used when studying fruits in health class. This would be a group project in which students would make a bulletin board display with different types of fruits (apples, oranges, peers, bananas, etc) by using wax paper and crayons. The students would make crayon shavings using only the color of their respective fruit (yellow for banana, orange for oranges) to create their wax-paper-crayon fruit. The students would then decorate the bulletin board and include a short description of the health benefits of fruits.