fall nature art

Nathan is a little artiste so I've been thinking what I wanted to do with him with art. He loves colors, so I wanted to do something with that. I want to expose him to different art mediums, and give him lots of things to look at to inspire creativity.

So, I saw this at a store:

And it gave me an idea. I bought canvases at the store and acrylic paint- red, yellow, blue, white, black and brown, and mod podge. We went outside with a basket, and the kids collected fall leaves. We brought them inside and for the background color, we tried to match the colors in the leaves we found. I showed Nathan how to mix colors to try and get the color he wanted. Then when the paint was dry, we could take scrapbook patterned paper to mod podge a picture on it, or mod podge the leaves we found on it, or just paint a picture on the background. All the pictures turned out very creative! Nathan took one leaf, matched the color and put the leaf on it to "camoflouge" it on the canvas. On another picture, he put the leaf on first, put color over it, then took the leaf off so there was a white outline of the leaf where there was no paint. On the canvas he matched a brown leaf color, blotted it with paper towel to add texture, and then took a tree stamp without paint and stamped it on, so it took paint off in the shape of a tree. This turned out really cool! With Katherine we mod podged a leaf on, then I gave her fall colors of paint and she had fun painting. Then we blotted off the paint with paper towel to add texture. Alex was at boy scouts when we did this, so he'll do it when we come back. I'll put these on the wall. Do you see the colors in the "stencil picture" of Nathan's from the leaf? He used a different leaf for the stencil since he painted over it.