A while back I drove past a house with a massive tree in their yard that was dropping the most beautiful autumn leaves all over the sidewalk. I made a mental note of it and went back a few days later to collect some of the fallen leaves.
Feeling a bit creative, I wanted to use them in an attempt to make some clay ornaments. I got the idea from YouTube but they were using cement, not clay so I wasn't sure how they would turn out.
The clay I have is air-drying so it doesn't need a kiln (bonus) but tends to be much more fragile when compared to the kiln-fired kind. I rolled out the clay to 5mm thick and pressed the leaves bottom side down into the clay to get the veins to show up in the surface. It worked out far better than I thought it would.
After cutting around each one, I let them air dry for a day and had to choose how to colour them. I decided to try watercolours as I don't have a wide variety of shades in acrylic paint.
As a practice run I drew a rough leaf shape and then coloured it in. It's not my best artistic impression of a leaf lol, but it had a purpose.
I tried way too many colours together but I wanted to see which ones would blend well together. I decided I didn't really like the way the oranges and reds would look so the first clay one I did was just using different shades of green and brown. Using watercolours is always a bit of a gamble with something like this because sometimes they work well and other times the colour seems to wash out. It depends largely on the medium you are working with at the time.
The clay surface is quite bumpy and I didn't like the look of it before I used the water to blend the colours.
The grainy look from the texture of the clay irritated me, but I was hopeful that once I brushed over it with a blending brush that it would have a cleaner look and the veins of the leaf would once again become visible, resembling the leaf that I used to model it from.
I was very happy with the effect I got once I had blended it. I have about 20 of these to colour and I'm quite excited about how they will turn out. They range in size from 6cm to 9cm in diameter. They are extremely brittle! The one that fell on the floor shattered into a quadrillion pieces and ended up in the bin, so they probably won't last that long - especially if the cats take an interest in them.
I wonder if there's a way to strengthen the clay once it's dry. Anyone have any ideas?