The View from St Francis Cottage - A Chattanooga Bed and Breakfast

Joint Craft Venture! - LEAF CASTINGS

Finished Concrete Leaf Castings.

We enjoy making leaf castings from elephant ears, hosta leaves and other leaves with a distinct vein pattern.  Nancy makes the castings using a high strength mortar mix reinforced with a central layer of fiber mesh joint reinforcement tape (used for sheetrock joints).  

High Strength Mortar Mix (Any good brand will work)

Fiber mesh tape (comes in various widths)

Molded Leaf after curing for 20 days.

Concrete Leaf impression detail.

Wallace takes over with the painting using acrylic or water based paints and stains using simple sponge brushes and small utility art brushes. Styles are usually taken from nature, but we sometimes just do colors that we like.  Some folks airbrush the patterns, others leave them plain and just seal them.  

Painted Molded Concrete Leaf

We finish them with a cement sealer or multiple layers of clear acrylic spray paint, making them suitable for outdoor use.  All of the leaves pictured are between 15 and 22 inches in length.

An early pattern.  No two are alike.

One of many variations.

There are many ideas, hints, lists of materials and techniques posted on the web.  We combined a number of the methods and experimented with a few mortar mixes to find what we liked best.  Look around out there and see what you find that suits your artistic style.                                                  .