The artist Tom Molloy moved to the Burren in Clare, and became interested in the work that botanists were doing in the area. In his artwork Oak, Molloy chose to draw leaves, rather than paint them, so that he could really focus attention on the appearance of the individual leaves.  All the leaves were from one particular oak tree. In all, he drew 96 leaves. 32 of these drawings are in the IMMA Collection. Each drawing shows the uniqueness of each leaf. But shown together, you can see the similarity which all the leaves have with each other. Look at the artwork closely—imagine how long it took to study and carefully draw each leaf.

What you will need:

• Leaves
• White paper
• Pencils
• Colouring pencils
• A ruler

Make your own leaf collection – steps:

• Begin by collecting as many different leaves from trees in your area.
• Place them on a large white sheet of paper, looking closely at each one and the wonderful details of each leaf.
• Now get a piece of A4 white paper. Using your ruler draw a grid dividing the page up into sections (like the squares on a maths copy book, but bigger).
• Choose your favourite leaf and fill the grid up with a pencil drawing, a colour drawing and a rubbing of that leaf.

It won’t take long before you have a beautiful leaf collection of studies to hang on your wall.

Finally please share your results, your experiments, and artworks with the hashtag #ExploreratHome