You really only need half an apple for this, so it is not a great craft for using up a surplus crop, but a great craft for having some fun and making some great decorated paper.
Cut an apple in half and and push a fork into the round part of the apple so that the fork can be used as a handle.
Dry the cut side and press it onto the paint, or use a brush to paint it onto the cut surface of the apple. Then press it onto some blank paper. It works best if you ‘re-load’ the paint onto the apple each time you make a print.
We almost always do this sort of printing as a layer of three primary colors, starting with the darkest so that the colors can be seen through each other.
If you are following the same color scheme that we did, then load the apple with blue paint and press it on the paper. Repeating a few times, spreading them across the paper.
Wipe the apple clean, and then when the blue apple prints are dry, load the apple with red paint and print on the paper, overlapping the blue apples a little.
Repeat with the yellow paint – cool!
You will need a paper plate, an egg carton, 2 buttons, some cardboard, some leaves, food coloring, paint and glue
Paint the bottom of the paper plate and leave to dry.
Cut the end two cups from the egg carton including the central peak. Paint the egg carton face with food coloring.
Glue a button to the bottom of each eye.
Cut feather shapes from the card. Write the things you are thankful for on each one.
Glue the dried leaves to the plate. Glue the face in place on the plate.and glue in place.
Make yourself comfortable, this paper craft for children has quite a few steps. All lots of fun of course, and a very cool result. This post is much longer than my usual ones, but I could not think of anything to leave out
This picture works well with opposites like a day and night picture, a happy and a sad face or seasonal changes. Your pictures need to be on exactly the same size pieces of paper. I used photocopy paper folded in half.
On my basic crayoned tree shapes I added different details suitable for each season.
I painted dye (or food coloring) over the pictures and the artwork is ready for the next stage.
To make a concertina that is the right size I started with a piece of light card the same size as the photocopy paper. I cut it in half and taped it together so that the card is double the width of each picture. I started to make the concertina by folding it in half and then each half again until I had the folds in the right place for the concertina.
A more accurate way would be to measure it all and rule lines to fold along, if you care about detail then I suggest you do this. But I tend to try the easy way first, and this worked out fine.
Then fold or measure the pictures and cut them so that the bits are the same size as the faces of the concertina. Be careful to keep all the bits in the right order together.
Finally glue a strip from each picture on to the concertina card, alternating between the two pictures.
When you stand them up and look at an angle your concertina picture quickly flips from one view …
… to another.
Then on this one turn it over for another view …
… and another.
No need to make a stencil for this printmaking, leaves all around us provide the perfect ready made shapes.
This is one of the decorative paper crafts for children – lots of cross-over into art! The results from this are beautiful, just a few of the craft uses for this leaf printed paper could be for cards or wrapping paper, or as a frame for a drawing about collecting the leaves.
Method First collect your leaves! You will need:
- leaves - paint and paper - dabber (a bunched up piece of sponge to dab paint instructions to make them here)
Arrange the leaves on your paper and dab the darkest paint around the edges of each leaf so that when you lift it off you can see the shape of the leaf on the paper. Once it is dry arrange your leaves on the paper again, in different places. Alternatively you could use different ones if you prefer. Dab a lighter color paint around the leaves this time so that the first darker layer shows through still. We have just used red and yellow in our leaf print but you could use more if you wanted.
When we had finished the leaves we had used looked really good too with extra colors around their edges! I will have to try and think which of the paper crafts for children I could use them for now. If you want to try some other leaf crafts for children there are more at Autumn / Fall Crafts for Children.
Children can study nature and create some artwork to use in other paper crafts with this printmaking technique.
Leaves are such a great subject for children’s art and craft. They come in a variety of shapes and colors and are usually pretty easy to come by. For the children, collecting leaves is part of the fun of the activity. Then their artwork reminds them of the collecting experience. Probably why I have so many leaf related artworks and crafts!
As I mentioned in the apple printing activity, once you start using objects to print with you keep thinking of more to try. So once you are all set up for printing the leaves, move onto anything else that the children suggest.
To make the leaf prints use a paintbrush or dabber, (scraps of material bunched up and secured with a rubber band) to apply paint to one side of a leaf. Place the leaf face down on some paper, place some scrap paper on top and press gently (the scrap paper protects the print from fingerprints).
This is a great activity for autumn when leaves are making such a display, but is also fine in summer when the leaves are still green. If you want to try some other leaf crafts for children there are more at Autumn / Fall Crafts for Children.
Do not try this at home, or school, or at Gran’s place!
Well if you do at least do not do it the way that I did – it was what is called a learning experience! I had seen someone else do some gorgeous sun prints that used a special light sensitive paper, they looked really great but I like using what I have at home, not having to buy any special materials. Although I love shopping, when I want to craft I want to do it straight away – no waiting!
I reckoned that ‘sugar’ paper fades really fast when you do not want it to, so I would use that instead. I found some interesting leaves, put my paper on a sunny window sill, grabbed some handy chestnuts to hold the leaves in place – and then instructed all to leave them alone. Now the sun does a lot of things, and one of them is to dry out stuff – which is proceeded to do with my leaves. So of course they shriveled and curled up – not really a nice clean leaf edge any more. My final print turned out to be some blurry blobs of color on the paper, not so good. However I have seen it used in other places with things that do not curl and shrivel, they used keys and scissors – perhaps I will have to try again!
But there was another interesting outcome – sort of related, remember I used chestnuts to hold down the leaves! We are over-run with chestnuts at the moment, we quite like them but never get around to cooking them, and we would still have too many to eat anyway.
So my husband took the chestnuts and threw them in the wood-burner. Now as he full knows – chestnuts expand when hot, which is why we usually cut little slits in the tops of them before cooking them. Hehehe – I can hassle him on this one for ages. The explosions started – little bits of chestnut were splattered all over the inside of the glass door of our wood-burner.
The children would have found it alarming except I was laughing so much at him and of course rolling my eyes, shaking my head – all the ‘that was silly’ signals. The children suggested counting the bangs so we knew if it would be safe to open the door to put more wood in. But as I pointed out we had not counted the chestnuts thrown in the fire, or the bangs so far. Husband rolled his eyes and said ‘it will be fine’ opened the door to add more wood and the biggest bang so far – hehehehe. I will get lots of mileage out of this one – thanks Honey!
