Make animals with leaves!

Add leaves to your art supplies and you’ll have endless fun! Leaves are a fantastic, free, and easily found material to use in your creative projects.

Step 1

Gather your materials. For this project you will need:

Now for the fun part! Get outside and collect leaves of different shapes, sizes, colors, and textures. Big ones, small ones, sharp ones, long ones, wide ones, fluffy ones, smooth ones, and shiny ones. You get the idea. You may be surprised when you notice just how many different types of leaves there are.

Did you know? Leaves help plants make food. They take light from the sun and turn into energy that plants use to grow. The shape, size, and texture of a plant’s leaves has to do with the environmental conditions it evolved in (for example, hot/dry vs. cold/wet) and what other plants it is related to.

Step 2

Examine your collection of leaves. Do any shapes jump out at you? Do they make you think of a particular type of animal, or part of an animal? Perhaps one of your leaves looks like the tail of a peacock or the claw of a crab.

Do any leaf colors or textures remind you of an animal? A purple leaf could become a starfish. A fluffy leaf would look great as a penguin chick or baby rabbit.

If you combine leaves of different shapes, what kinds of animals could you make? Maybe you could make a fish, or a bird, or even a pack of hungry wolves!

Step 3

Create! Some tips:

Before you start to lay out your leaves, it may help to draw a pencil sketch of the animal you want to create on your paper.
You can use the leaves just as they are. Or you can use scissors to cut the leaves into other shapes.
If you wish, you can embellish your leaves with pens, paint pens, and paints.
You can make 1 type of animal. Or you can make a scene featuring many animals.
You may want to make background elements like trees and rocks out of leaves too.

Step 4

Share your art with friends and family!

Saving your artwork:

If using fresh leaves, they will dry out! We suggest you take a photograph of your art to preserve your creation. You could print it out and make a poster for your wall.

We’d love to see your leaf art too. If you’d like to share your creations with Mongabay Kids, your guardians can contact us using the information on our About us page, or by email: kids [at] mongabay.com.

For educators

This is a fun project for art or science class. It encourages connection with nature, exploration, observation skills, and creativity. It teaches students about shape, color, texture, and how to play with combinations of shapes. See below for more learning resources about leaves.

This activity can be modified into a team or whole class project. Some ideas:

Explore the animals of your local area.
Invite students to create the different animals that make up a food web.
Create a group of one type of animal, such as all mammals, or all birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects, or arachnids.
Explore an ecosystem by creating the animals of a rainforest, savanna, coral reef, desert, or tundra.