Turn a simple walk outside into a colorful fall art project with crayons, leaves, and a little creativity.

Some of the best kids’ activities don’t require a cart full of craft supplies or hours of planning. Sometimes all you need is a handful of leaves, some paper, and a box of crayons.

Leaf rubbing is one of those classic childhood activities that is wonderfully simple, but there’s more to it than just the finished picture. Half the fun is heading outside together to find the leaves in the first place.

Start With a Leaf-Hunting Adventure

Before you sit down to make anything, head outside for a walk around the yard, neighborhood, park, or local nature trail and let the kids hunt for interesting leaves.  Look for different shapes and sizes. See if you can find leaves with deep veins, pointy edges, rounded edges, tiny leaves and enormous ones. Kids can compare them, sort them, or try to find leaves from several different kinds of trees.

You don’t need to turn it into a formal nature lesson, either. Simply noticing what’s around you is part of the fun. Which leaf is the biggest? Which has the strangest shape? Can you find two that look almost identical?

Then bring your collection back to an outdoor table and keep enjoying the fall weather while you create. If it’s chilly or rainy, bring everything inside and turn the kitchen table into your art studio.

What You’ll Need

• Freshly collected leaves
• Plain white or light-colored paper
• Crayons or Cray-Pas/oil pastels
• A flat work surface
• Optional: cardstock, frames, laminating sheets or Mod Podge for turning the finished artwork into something special

I especially like using regular crayons or Cray-Pas for this project because they pick up all those wonderful little veins and textures hiding in the leaves.

How to Make a Leaf Rubbing

Place a leaf on your work surface and put a sheet of paper over the leaf and hold it in place with one hand.

If you’re using a crayon, remove the wrapper and turn the crayon on its side. Gently rub it back and forth across the paper where the leaf is hiding underneath.

And then comes the fun part: the leaf almost magically begins to appear.

Keep rubbing until you can see the shape, veins and edges. Kids can use one color for the entire leaf or layer different fall colors together. Try reds, oranges, yellows, greens, browns and even unexpected colors. There are no rules saying a maple leaf can’t be purple!

Move the leaves around underneath the paper to create a whole page of overlapping leaf prints, or make individual rubbings and cut them out for other projects.

You can also have the kids tape the leaves down onto another paper or use painters tape to tape them onto your surface then put the coloring paper on top. 

Don't Stop at the Rubbing

The finished artwork can become much more than another piece of paper destined for the refrigerator.

Try:

• Framing it for inexpensive seasonal fall decor.
• Laminating the pages to make homemade fall placemats.
• Cutting out the leaf shapes to create cards, banners or decorations.
• Using Mod Podge to incorporate the artwork into lanterns, platters, or  other craft projects.
• Making a fall nature book and labeling the different leaves you collected.
• Giving the artwork as a gift to grandparents or other family members.

Older kids can even turn their rubbings into a little nature study by trying to identify the trees their leaves came from.

A Little Art, A Little Nature and a Lot of Possibilities

What I love most about leaf rubbing is that it takes something kids may have walked past a hundred times and asks them to look at it differently.

Suddenly, a leaf isn’t just a leaf. There are lines and patterns, shapes and textures that you might never notice until they appear underneath a crayon.

And that’s really the beauty of activities like this. You get outside, explore for a while, bring a little piece of nature home and see what you can create with it.

No complicated setup required. Just go outside, gather, notice, create and see where it takes you.