Exercise fine motor skills while creating beautiful seasonal artwork.Make colors pop out with bold crayon strokes and contrasting colors! Nature Stencils produce fantastic, detailed images for children to experiment with. For this activity, we will overlap the illustrations–this will cause enclosed spaces to be formed by the overlapped leaves. Each enclosed space will be colored differently than the spaces surrounding it. This will make each child’s artwork look like a unique bed of leaves! Combine this activity with outdoor excursions or science class lessons about ecology and life cycles.

Teach students to use stencils in order to build up their skills in stenciling and tracing. Stencils encourage children to develop their drawing skills; over time, students will wean themselves off of stenciling and will start to produce their artwork from memory. This project can be done with basic shapes such as stars, squares or circles. Have a look at our R58620 Fine Motor Skills Silly Stencils or R5522 Child’s First Stencil Set™ if you plan to introduce this activity to pre-K children. 

You’ll need:

• R5615 Nature Stencils

• Crayons

• Pencil

• Blank white construction paper

Choose one Nature Stencils plate per sheet of paper. Place the stencil on top of the sheet of paper and trace around the inside edges with a pencil. Once you are finished tracing out the entire image, remove the plate and place it back down in another spot on the paper. Tip: Rotate the plate in different directions to make the leaves look as if they have fallen randomly onto the page. It’s okay if your tracings overlap–we will get to this in a second! For now, fill up the entire page with about 5-6 tracings of your stencil, making sure that the leaves overlap in certain parts.

Next, choose crayon colors that may represent leaf-like colors. Start by coloring in the overlapped part of a leaf with one single color. Move onto the section beside it and color that section a completely different color. Continue coloring in the different sections until there is no more white remaining on the page. You can color the background in a solid contrasting color. In the example below, I used the color blue for the background so that you can really see how the color of the leaves seem to pop out!

What a beautiful picture! Try out this style of artwork with other types of stencils!