Wax resist watercolor leaf painting

We love to paint with watercolor and especially love making wax resist paintings. This morning we embarked on an adventure to make fall leaf wax resist watercolor paintings. They were so much fun to make! This is a great Autumn themed art project for all ages. It is such a wonderful way to use our beautiful Autumn leaves and craft them into fall inspired art to decorate our house for the season. We love to incorporate nature into our art and have these treasures grace the walls of our home throughout the fall season!

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We previously shared about making our Leaf Man inspired art projects. We had leaves left over in our harvest baskets after creating that day so decided to press them. I have several thick art and science project books in our homeschool collection that I use for pressing leaves. We placed the leaves in a single layer every few pages then let the book sit for a few days. Then we had a lovely pile of pressed Autumn leaves to create more fall inspired art projects!

This project can be made with fresh or pressed and dried Autumn leaves. We normally use our favorite thick watercolor paper when painting with watercolors but this project works best with standard paper like computer paper.

How to make wax resist watercolor leaf art

Supplies:
-white wax crayon

-watercolor paints

-watercolor brushes (Little Brother’s set of watercolor brushes worked great for this project!)

-paper (we used standard white printer paper)

-fresh or pressed/dried Autumn leaves of various shapes and sizes

Directions:

Step 1: Make a wax leaf rubbing. To do this, place a leaf on a flat, hard, smooth surface. Lay the piece of paper on top. Hold the paper firmly on top of the leaf with one hand and use your other hand to color over top the leaf with the white wax crayon. Big Sister is 7 years old and could do this part of the project herself but 2 year old Little Brother needed my help. We had the best results coloring the white wax in one direction horizontally across the leaf and stem. You will not be able to see the white wax leaf rubbing on the white paper but can feel it when you run your hand over top.

Step 2: Use watercolor paint and paint across the top of the wax leaf rubbing. The paint will not stick to the paper where there is wax so you will see the white leaf shape showing through your painting. Sometimes if Big Sister had too much water on her brush, the wax leaf rubbing did not show through the watercolor paint as well. When this happened, we blotted the paper gently with a rag to remove excess water.