Create a stunning art display in your home or classroom with these colorful leaf silhouettes. Using simple supplies like black paper, tissue paper, scissors and a glue stick, kids as young as 8 will enjoy creating more than one!

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 12″ x 9″ black paper (sulphite or construction paper)
• Scraps of 6″ x 4″ tissue paper (I used fall colors but feel free to use any color you wish)
• Light colored oil pastel or crayon for drawing
• Glue stick
• Scissors

Here’s what to do:

Print out the leaf prints in the handout below. Children can use the leaf drawings as inspiration or go outside to collect a few leaves of their own.

Fold black paper in half either horizontally or vertically depending on the leaf. A wide leaf should be drawn on the folded horizontal paper.

Looking carefully at the leaf, draw half of the leaf. Draw as large as possible. It is helpful to draw a line through each leaf so the children can visualize what half a leaf looks like.

Make sure the center of the drawing is on the folded line of the paper.

Once the contour line or outside line is drawn, draw another line inside this line. I call this an echo line. Make the line at least the width of your finger.

It’s helpful to draw one or two intersecting lines so that when the child cuts out the negative shapes, the leaf has various shapes within the leaf. Definitely more difficult to explain than to do!

Make sure to remind the child that when drawing the leaf shape and creating the segments, they can cross out any lines they don’t like. The back of my leaves are quite messy!

Adding the tissue paper

Use a glue stick to run lines of glue over the back (or messy crayon) part of the leaf. Cut out small sections of tissue paper and lay over the glue.

The tissue will overlap other tissues and will also overlap the edges…and that’s okay. When all the spaces have been covered with tissue paper, turn over the leaf and snip any access tissue away.

Download a Drawing Guide…