If like me you are looking for crafts to keep little ones busy this activity is perfect and adds a little extra fun to your daily walk. We spent our sunny afternoon stroll searching for interesting leaf and flower shapes to make our printing project. My daughter who is 4 absolutely loved this project as demonstrated by her little hands.
What you’ll need -
- Paper
- Ink or poster paint
- Leaves and flowers
- Paint trays
- Rollers or brushes
- Heavy books for pressing
The beauty of this little activity is that you can use any paints or inks you have in the house already so its cheap and simple to do.
For our prints we used water based block printing ink because that’s what we had already but it will work just as well with poster paints.
Step 1 -
Add a good dollop of ink or paint to your tray, we then used our rollers to roll the ink out over the tray to give a nice even covering but you can also use a brush to even it out.
We then took an assortment of our leaves and pressed them firmly into the inks making sure that all areas had a good covering.
Top tip - the undersides of leaves sometimes have more pronounced patterns so put them in facing up.
Step 2 -
Once you have made sure all of your leaves have a good covering of ink carefully lift the out of the tray and arrange them inky side down on a piece of paper. Give them a little press to make sure they are all flat to make maximum contact with the paper.
Step 3 -
Once you have your leaf pattern arranged lay another piece of paper on top. We then need to press the leaves to make sure the ink transfers onto the paper - for this we used a pile of large heavy books which were big enough to cover the paper - and pushed down on the stack to press the leaves.
Step 4 -
After pressing, lift off the stack of books and extra sheet of paper. Carefully peel the leaves from the paper. You can keep them to repeat the process if you wish.
Once you have taken off all the leaves you have your finished print. Get your little artist to sign their masterpiece and if you want repeat the process over again.
So there we have it, a quick but effective project to keep little hands busy. Why not try it after making your own leaf collection? We’d love to see your prints so do tag in @buffandblueprints on Facebook and Instagram.
Happy printing!
