These fall leaf silhouettes are fun and easy to make using wax paper, paint and black paper. Decorate your windows for fall with these vibrant leaves to brighten up your home or classroom.
Here’s another terrific fall leaf craft that kids of all ages will love. It’s a fun and creative art process, a silhouette project, and a window decoration all rolled into one fun project.
Younger children will love our tissue paper sticky window art activity.
A fun and fascinating process
To make these leaf silhouettes, we’re using a process that we call scrape painting. You may have seen this process shared on the blog a few years ago when we made our fall napkin rings and this fall garden collage.
Scrape painting can be enjoyed by kids of all ages from toddlers right through to teens. The process involves “scraping” complimentary paint colours together with an expired credit card or gift card. This produces a lovely blend of colours which you can frame as abstract art, use as a backdrop for another art project or cut into smaller pieces like we’re doing today.
Translucent paper
Scrape painting can done on any kind of canvas, but to make our sun catchers, your canvas needs to be translucent so the sun can shine through it and illuminate your paint colours. We’ve found that wax paper and parchment paper both work well.
A happy pop of colour
You can see just how pretty our finished leaf silhouettes look in our dining room window. They add such a happy pop of colour to the room when the sun is shining, and even on a dull day, they really brighten the window.
Let me show you how easy they are to make.
Need a template for your leaf shapes?
You can print ours here.
How to Make our Fall Leaf Silhouette Window Art:
For your conviencience, this post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Supplies:
*If you don’t have an expired gift card or credit card, a thin, stiff piece of cardboard (think cereal box) will work. Just cut it to roughly the same size as a credit card, and make sure your scraping edge is nice and straight.
Time needed: 1 hour
Fall Leaf Silhouette Window Art Instructions
- Paint your coloured paper (scrape painting)
Lay a piece of wax paper or parchment paper on a flat surface
- Drizzle paint
Drizzle several paint colours on the paper. We used yellow, orange, red, burgundy, pink and a bit of brown.
- Fold and press
Fold the paper in half and press it together with your hands. Pull the credit card across the surface of the paper, until all the paint between the two layers of paper is blended together.
- Open and scrape
Open the wax paper back up. Using the credit card, scrape the paper from one end to the other to remove any excess paint. Wipe the excess on a paper towel before scraping another section of the paper. Set paper aside too dry.
- Make your silhouette shapes
Trace leaf shapes onto black paper.
- Cut out
Cut out the leaf shape
- Fold and cut out the inside of the leaf
Fold your leaf in half, and make another cut about an 1/8th of an inch in from the edge of the leaf, following the shape of the leaf all the way around. This will remove the inside of the leaf, leaving you with your silhouette. Note: The inside piece which you cut out can be used to make a smaller leaf silhouette.
- Glue silhouettes to painted paper
Glue your silhouettes to your sheet of coloured wax paper.
- Cut out
Cut out all of your individual leaf silhouettes.
Once you have all of your leaf silhouettes cut out, tape them up in a window, and enjoy their beauty when the sun shines through them.
For more silhouette projects, check out our City Skyline Silhouette Art and our Brushed Fall Leaf Silhouette Art projects.
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Jackie is a mom, wife, home daycare provider, and the creative spirit behind Happy Hooligans. She specializes in kids’ crafts and activities, easy recipes, and parenting. She began blogging in 2011, and today, Happy Hooligans inspires more than 2 million parents, caregivers and Early Years Professionals all over the globe.
