Leaf Art: Tissue Paper Bleeding

Make some gorgeous leaf art for Autumn with this tissue paper bleeding project! So simple and mess free, the results are gorgeous and are a great way to explore shapes, overlapping and colour mixing too.

Here’s another leaf art project for Autumn, or easily adaptable for any other season using different colours (or even flowers, animals, the alphabet, numbers etc!)

Materials needed:

tissue paper (non-colour fast)

water

paintbrushes

paper

I cut a variety of leaf shapes out of non-colour fast tissue paper, in a range of Autumnal shades. It’s really important that the tissue paper will bleed the colour when wet, otherwise this won’t work at all! Thankfully, it’s often the cheaper tissue paper that is really vibrant and non-colour fast. We use Craftworks brand which I find in packs of 100 sheets for 99p in The Works, which is quite a bargain for tissue paper.

I set these out along with large, A3 pieces of white paper and some pots of water and paintbrushes.

Then they simply placed the leaf shapes wherever they wanted them on the paper, and washed over the top using water and brushes. There’s no need to use glue as the water adheres the tissue paper to the paper.

Even though they were using the same shapes, they each created a completely different piece of art work.

Miss 6 was very keen to overlap her leaves to create the look of them falling down from the trees into a heap.

Once the water had dried, they simply peeled off the dry tissue paper leaves to reveal the gorgeous printed impressions underneath.

In some places where the leaves had overlapped, the colours had bled together to create new ones, which made a lovely result and opened up the discussion about colour mixing too.

What they are learning as they play:

creativity: overlapping, colour mixing, exploring shapes, colour transfer

physical: cutting, sticking, painting

Here are some other TISSUE PAPER ACTIVITIES we have done together

And see the full ART & CRAFT archives for plenty of inspiration from baby to school age

Here is my Art & CREATIVITY for KIDS board on Pinterest to follow too. I’d love to see you over there!

Follow Anna @ The Imagination Tree’s board Art and Creativity for Kids on Pinterest.