Splatter Painting Leaves

AFTER looking for leaves shaped liked stars and hands in nature class last week, we continued our study of leaf shapes in our own back garden. Autumn is so often about the colour of leaves, but having them all around on the ground is such a great opportunity to look at their other attributes! We found leaves with fingers, with noses, with teeth, with holes. Even to me it was quite a revelation to ignore the colours and look at other things. Of course, most leaves were from trees in our own garden, but we found a stray tulip tree leaf and couldn't even identify the source in neighbouring properties. I said it must have floated a long way on a breeze, and Emma contemplated: "Perhaps it heard we were having a Michaelmas Celebration and wanted to come to the party." Perhaps indeed.

With our leaf collection we preserved the shapes by splatter painting all around the edges with old toothbrushes. It took a few tries to get the paint consistency right, but they turned out quite pretty. We'll do some more for our nature table, I think.