Fall Leaf Frottages

Many art rooms have some type of texture plates that students can make rubbings from. There are all kinds of possibilities and here are 3 different ways to use them. I did these lessons in the fall, when leaves are top of the list. It is also a good ice breaker for getting back into school.

The top leaves were done by my 1st graders. They traced leaf shapes from leaf tracers, then used the rubbing plates to create texture and color. After cutting out the leaves they glued them onto some gold paper, cut this out leaving a border. They repeated this step choosing a color paper of their choice. Finally they punched holes all the way around and laced yarn around their leaves. The final results are quite nice.


These leaves were done by my 2nd graders. I did a guided drawing of how to draw a leaf. After drawing the leaf, the students divided the backgrounds and added lines inside their leaves. Their job was then to use different colors in the different sections, using warm colors in the leaves and cool colors in the background.






































This last project was done with my 3rd graders. They traced leaves on a large piece of paper while over lapping some of the leaves and making sure that some of the leaves went off the side of the paper. We talked about composition. Then the students colored the leaves in using the texture plates. In all of the lessons we talked about how this technique is called frottage.