Thursday, June 25, 2009

Leaf Printing






I made some leaf printed thank you cards last year and yesterday I got the urge again. My son and I had a blast.

Supplies:
Acrylic Paint (We used assorted greens and yellows)
Pre made note cards or cardstock
Brushes
Plastic plate or paint palette
And Leaves of course ( the ones with raised veins work best)

Sort through your leaves and pick one that you like. Turn the backside and apply chosen color with your brush ( not too heavy) . Flip over and lay on the card. Press with your fingers to get all the paint to the paper(don't worry if it squishes out a bit). You can pull up a little to see if it has all transferred. If not lay it back down and rub again. And then pull up. They aren't meant to look machine made. It is supposed to have the hand made feel so not always will the paint transfer perfectly and that is great. Then move onto other leaves and colors. You just work very intuitively and don't worry if you don't like it it is only paint and paper. I usually can't wait to pull up the leaf to see what it came out like. And I don't clean my brush all the time in between colors. Since I worked with similar colors it was fine.

This is so easy to do and so much fun. Gather your supplies and you can make tons of these as inexpensive gifts or keep for yourself and send to your friends and family with a little note inside.

Have fun with this. You will want to do leaf printing on everything ( and your kids will too)!!

I am going to include this set of cards (tied with a pretty little ribbon) with the next piece of art sold in the shop!!

3 comments:

Shayne said...

oh this is great, I am doing it with my kids this week. do you mind if I post it to my blog when we do...I will link back to you.

Dana Barbieri said...

Hi Shayne. That is great you are going to do this with your kids!! My son is 4 and he enjoyed it. It is great since he picked out all of his leaves in the yard and got messy with the paint. I love it since there is no right or wrong way to do. I hope they have a good time with it. And of course you can post it to your blog! Have fun! ( And don't forget leaf rubbings are fun too!)

Tricia said...

Those are beautiful!