(cheerful music) - Hey everyone, Mike here from GPB Education.

I want to show you a cool technique that will let you make your own art but also allows you to get outdoors and enjoy some sunshine, and it's called leaf smashing, sometimes it's called leaf hammering.

So let's see what you need.

A hammer obviously, you should be more concerned with the edge than the face itself.

You're gonna be using the edge.

You could use a smooth rock as well but it needs to be something a little hefty, be careful.

Some masking tape, you need a variety of leaves, maybe even some flowers which we'll talk about in a bit here.

I just went out down the street and picked a few.

You could go to a park or you could go by your school.

If you wanna label these leaves, so you figure out which ones are working best, you can be a little bit of a naturalist there, a pen, maybe some sticky notes.

You could even have a notebook and, kind of, keep a journal about which ones are working, which ones you want to go back to, which ones not to go back to.

Then you will need some scissors and some cloth.

I'm using an old T-shirt that I cut up, a hundred percent cotton is what you need.

If you can't get your hands on fabric like that, you can use something like watercolor paper.

Again, you'll need some scissors to cut those up.

I've already cut mine up, so let's get to it.

What you're gonna do is take your fabric and you're gonna tape, with the masking tape, your leaves onto them.

And you're gonna take your hammer and smash the leaves and it's gonna push the chlorophyll into the fabric as a pigment and we're hoping it dyes the fabric.

So let's do some taping.

Think about your art classes and some of what you learned about design and placement and how different elements go together.

So I'll just do a simple design.

These three here, maybe like that.

I'm gonna keep my flower for my watercolor paper.

Flowers don't tend to do all that well on fabric, they tend to wash out.

When you're taping make sure you tape the entire leaf down and sometimes I like to put the veins towards the fabric.

(cheerful music) This is called in the folk, traditional art circle, basting.

And you can try various patterns.

If you have several different pieces of fabric, if you have multiple leaves, you can see which kinds of arrangements work best for you, what you like.

And what this is gonna do is, it's gonna entirely dry the leaves out because you going to remove all the chlorophyll and put that chlorophyll onto your fabric.

A little bit more, okay.

So I've got my leaves taped on.

I'm gonna turn it over so that the masking tape is facing my table.

So what I'm doing is just using a simple table but I've put a board on top of it and then a towel that I'm not really concerned about, on top of that board, we don't want to damage anything.

And because you are going to be using a hammer and hitting things, there's gonna be some noise so the towel both protects the wood that I'm hitting and it, kind of, mutes the noise which I'm sure everyone will be happy about.

When I lay down my fabric I can see the outline of some of these leaves.

So I just wanna start with the outline, then maybe some of the veins and see how the colors are going.

So let's get hammering.

(hammer hammering) So this purple has a lot of good color.

You definitely need patience because you're just gonna spend a good deal of time hammering.

(hammer hammering) You can see already, that's not bad, a little brown too, right?

Let's try my longer green leaf, this is, kind of, from a weed I found in the backyard.

(hammer hammering) So that looks pretty good.

You can see, you can do all sorts of things there.

You could even take your masking tape and curl that around or use several ones to make a different design.

One more in the middle.

(hammer hammering) A little bit more color, nothing exceptional.

And of course I would spend more time on these to fill them out.

That's where the patients comes in.

But when you are finished, you can remove your masking tape and you'll see that your leaves are pretty darn dried up and that you have stained your fabric.

(cheerful music) What you'll want to do then, is once they dry, you'll remove what's left of your leaves and then you're gonna soak them in a mixture of vinegar and water, you don't want to wash them straight up with a detergent.

And what happens is you will get something that looks a little bit like this.

So the pattern will be stained into the fabric.

I have another one here.

This one has some flowers in it.

You'll see a little bit more of the color.

There's some yellows, but the greens and the purples which, sort of, turn brown look really good.

Now, like I said earlier about flowers, sometimes flowers don't work entirely on fabric but they can.

Here's a version I did earlier, a flower on watercolor paper.

Now the only difference here is when you place your flower, you're not going to use tape because the tape would tear the watercolor.

So what I'm just gonna do is put some fabric over it and I'll press down and turn it over.

And then we'll do the same thing I did earlier with the hammering.

And you might see some of the color come through on the watercolor paper.

(hammer hammering) And I just flip it over, not bad.

It does look really great on your fabric.

I've got some pretty oranges there but when I use the vinegar, sometimes those come out.

You can try leaves and you can try flowers and see what works best for you.

That's where some of these little stickies might come in handy and you can make notes about which flowers, where you got them and what kind of patterns they are making.

Hope you enjoyed it.

We should have some resources for you.

If you want to continue to get out there, see some leaves and make some art for yourself and have a great day.

(cheerful music)