Hedgehog Leaf Printing Craft

This weekends craft was making a hedgehog using leaf printing! At school they are working on the theme ‘Autumn’, so I try to pick something to do that matches with that for the weekend.

We all went outside and gathered up lots of different leaves, small ones, big ones and lots of different shapes. Luckily for us it has been dry, else you need to gather the leaves the day before and let them dry off in the house before doing the craft.

I printed off a couple of copies of my cute hedgehog printable (you can download a copy for free at the bottom of the post), and I set out plates with autumn coloured paints: red, orange, yellow, brown & gold.

Let the kids get to work using a sponge to cover the back of the leaf with paint (thin layers work best) and then pressing the leaf, paint side down, onto the paper to create the spikes. Younger children can also just use the leaf as a paintbrush, or do fingerpainting.

Extra tips

  • Let the children help getting the paints ready. We only had red, yellow and black paint. So they helped me mix up some orange paint using red and yellow, and then some brown paint by adding a bit of black to the orange mix. They then had a go at mixing their own paint colours.
  • On a plain piece of paper to demonstrate how you use the leaf to print, and show them the pattern it makes. Get them to try printing with a leaf on the scrap paper and compare the different patterns from the different leaves.