Gather bunches of twigs and small branches. Collect some with berries and silver or white bark as well as brown. Divide the brown-bark twigs into two piles. Paint one pile with gold craft paint and leave to dry. Lie all the branches flat on sheets of old newspaper and spray a fine mist of gold aerosol paint over them to give them a glitter effect. Turn over and spray again. When dry, bind together at the base with gold ribbon.
Collect fallen leaves and lay them out to dry. Fold a sheet of 8 1/2-by-11-inch card stock in half to create a greetings card. Dip folded absorbent paper in gold paint and dab over the veins on the side of the leaf on which they are most prominent. Use tweezers to place it on the card painted-side down. Lay a sheet of plain paper on top and press down gently over the leaf to print its pattern onto the card, then remove paper and leaf. Repeat several times. Then dip two or three leaves in Poly-vinyl acetate (PVA) glue and use tweezers to place them on the card. Leave to dry.
Cut large leaf shapes from sheets of colored paper. Punch a hole at the stem end and thread through with colored ribbon or string. Find a small tree in the forest that has shed its summer leaves, and tie on your paper leaves to create a living art installation. Take photographs to display later in your home or the art room.
Take photographs of different winter forest trees and objects such as pine cones or bunches of berries with a digital camera. Each object should take up about a quarter of the frame so that when the photo is printed out at standard 4-inch-by-6-inch size, the object is about 1 inch by 1 1/2 inches. Decoupage images should usually be quite small. Download the photos onto a computer and print onto ordinary paper. Cut out the different objects. Take a plain place mat and coat with a paint of PVA glue. Dampen paper cut-outs with water and place onto the mat, overlapping them slightly until entire top surface of the mat is covered. Leave to dry and seal with another coat of PVA glue.