Try this Coffee Filter Fall Tree Art project for kids. Paint coffee filters, then turn them into colorful hills, trees and falling leaves.

Finished Coffee Filter Fall Tree Art with colorful painted hills, autumn trees and falling leaves.

Coffee Filter Fall Tree Art Lesson

This Coffee Filter Fall Tree Art lesson is a fun way to celebrate the season with lots of beautiful fall colors. Kids get to paint coffee filters first, then cut and arrange their painted papers to make colorful hills, trees and falling leaves.

The coffee filters make this project extra fun because the colors blend and spread so easily. It’s a simple way for kids to experiment with warm colors, organic shapes, overlapping and composition without making any of those concepts feel too complicated.

I also love how much room there is for kids to make this project their own. They can choose their favorite fall colors and arrange all of their pieces in different ways, which means every finished picture will be a little different.

Best of all, the lesson is easy to break down into manageable steps, so kids can follow along and feel successful. It’s a colorful fall project that looks impressive when it’s finished, without making things complicated for the teacher.

Join “The Daily Draw” below to get this PDF!

Coffee Filter Fall Tree Art diagram showing the steps for making the colorful fall collage.

Why This Lesson Works in an Elementary Art Classroom

This project is also a fun way to introduce kids to the colorful cut-paper art of Henri Matisse. Later in his career, Matisse began creating art by cutting shapes from sheets of paper that had been painted with bright colors and then arranging them into compositions.

You can make an easy connection to his process with this lesson because kids are doing something similar. Instead of starting with construction paper, they get to create their own colorful art paper by painting coffee filters first, then cutting or tearing them into shapes to build their fall landscapes.

It’s also a great time to talk about organic shapes. The rolling hills, tree tops and falling leaves all have the kind of free-flowing shapes that you can find in many of Matisse’s cut-paper artworks.

Before the glue comes out, encourage kids to move their pieces around and try a few different arrangements. They can overlap their hills, change the placement of their trees and scatter their leaves until they find a composition they like.

And while fall is the perfect excuse to bring out lots of reds, oranges and yellows, kids don’t have to stick with realistic colors. Matisse was famous for his bold use of color, so this is a great opportunity to let kids experiment and see where their own color choices take them.