Printingmaking Made Easy!

Since I've spent the last couple of weeks in Printmaking Land with my second and third graders, I thought I'd share everything I know about printmaking in the elementary art room! I started to record a podcast episode which quickly turned into TWO podcast episodes. There's a lot to printmaking in the elementary art room but none of it is scary, difficult or even all that messy! My kids love it and so do I. So I'll be sharing both podcast episodes here as well as my favorite lessons. Be sure and click the link as it will take you directly to the lessons which often feature a video for you and your students!

In the first episode in this series, I focus a lot on printing with Styrofoam sheets. They are a great alternative to having small children carve into linoleum or wood blocks (lord, I can see the lawsuit now!) and can produce beautiful results. Here's everything I could think of about printing with Styrofoam sheets!

My favorite tip is to have kids use ink pens when incising the lines into the foam. I have them use a blue pen first and a black pen second. This ensures that they'll incise the lines deeply enough by doing it twice. When I see the black ink pen, I know they've traced their lines not once but twice. 

In this episode, I talk a lot about supplies and set up. Here's a visual! My second graders are doing a rainbow roll in this photo. Notice the dollops of ink at the top of the tray where they are to dip their brayer, not roll through the ink. Then, in the space below, they are to roll their brayer up and down only (so as not to mix the colors) to cover the brayer before rolling it onto their printing plate. Messy mats are used to help keep the table clean. Students also place all of their prints on the messy mat during clean up (without stacking them as they will stick together) and slide the entire mat onto our drying rack. Then we toss our printing plates in one sink, brayers and trays in another for me to do a quick wash after school.

In the episode, I also mention printing on newspapers, painted papers, wrapping paper, metallic papers and much more. The results are stunning!

 

In the follow-up episode, I talk about printing in 30-minute classes. On the first day, we do a single color print like these third-grade robots you see here. The following art class, we do a rainbow roll like you saw above. 

 On our third day of printing, we spend a hot minute adding more designs to our printing plates before doing a reduction print. The kids were fascinated by this process. 

And on the last day, we make these! Never throw away those printing plates or simply send them home. You can make such cool works of art with them with inexpensive foil sheets, steel wool and spray paint. Take a listen to find out how!

 Third Grade Cities! This lesson was a hit as the kids were allowed to swap cities to create some diversity in their finished piece. The complete lesson in the link!

Winter Portraits by Second Grade  Need a fun way to introduce printmaking and patterns?  Check out this self-portrait project!

Egyptian God Portraits Fourth grade students used their knowledge of Egyptian gods and symbols to print the designs in the background of these portraits. 

Positive Four Letter Word Collages with Prints! This is a lesson I return to year after year and seem to change and tweek each time. You can see alternatives to this lesson here. 

Gelatin Prints  I don't do this kind of printing anymore with homemade gelatin printing plates for a couple of reasons: I don't like using the gelatin (it's an animal product that I'm not comfortable using) and it's labor-intensive. BUT the results! There are recipes for making your own more permanent printing plates that don't seem to be difficult at all. I found several on YouTube. 

 Sushi Collage with Gelli-Plate Prints I do have a class set of Gelli-Plates and we love them. The best thing to do is just let your kids go crazy exploring different methods of printing on the surface with stencils and texture and color. In the end, you'll have a fun stack of papers like you see below that can then be used to create collages like you see above!

 If you would like a video to walk you through more of these processes, be sure and check out this blog post! 

Collagraph Prints are ones created by adding things to a surface. This is different that the Styrofoam prints which are a subtractive kind of printing. Collagraphs are additive. My fourth graders created these prints a couple years ago in celebration of dot day!  

That project was very similar to one I did just last year with my kindergarten friends! We used foam hearts from the Dollar Tree as the base and sticky-backed foam stickers for the design. You can see the complete lesson here. 

 We collaged our completed hearts for these sweet masterpieces.

We then wrapped our lesson by wrapping our hearts and doing a little burnishing as I mentioned at the start of this blog post! I hope that gives you a bunch of ideas for printmaking in your art room and removes any fear that you may have! Happy Printing!

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Field Trip! Sawtooth Print Shop

I'm excited to share with my students and y'all another installment in that series of videos that I'm calling Field Trip!  I got the idea to visit contemporary artists and film them in action to share with my students. The goal is for them to see living artists creating and know that creating art takes many forms from mural painting to folk art to...printmaking. Which brings me to these two good lookin' folks, Chris Cheney and Nieves Uhl of Sawtooth Print Shop.

They are seriously so much fun!

I met Chris and Nieves at a workshop hosted by The Frist Center for Visual Arts. We had so much fun that when I was dreaming up artists to visit, their studio immediately came to mind. Not surprisingly, they were totally open to the idea and were gracious enough to carve time (see what I did there? "Carve"...get it?!) out of their busy schedule to show me just how they create their prints. They were so thorough in their explanations that I believe kids will understand their process. 

Personally, I just loved exploring their space and snapping photos for their vintage typeface. I was told most are purchased from former printmakers who no longer have a means to print or a desire to do so. 

 I loved how clearly they explained the reasoning behind carving backwards. I know I would mess that up ALL.THE.TIME. I don't know how they do it.

Both artists did their internship at Hatch Show Print which must-see if you are ever visiting beautiful downtown Nashville. 

I felt like I learned so much from this field trip as well! Seeing the process of how their posters are creating was like taking a step back in time. I think that showing this Field Trip! video will be a great introduction to any printmaking unit. 

Since we're talking about printmaking, I thought I'd add some of my favorite printmaking projects and videos to this post. 

You don't need fancy printmaking supplies to create great prints with your students. In a pinch, you can use styrofoam sheets, markers, paper and a damp sponge. If you've never tried marker prints, they are a game changer! First grade created these lovely prints with that method. More details here. 

Last year, third grade tried their hand at printmaking with these beautiful cityscape prints. 

For that, we did use ink but markers could have been used as well. 

Gelli Plates make a great printmaking surface as well, which is what we used for this Andy Warhol-inspired lesson. I've created my own gelatin plates and had the kids use those as well. 

Earlier this year, my third graders created these marker prints and used them in a fall collage. 

Fourth grade created these radial prints for Dot Day and had a ton of fun. 

Seriously, y'all. This poster created by Sawtooth is a kid-fave in my room.  

Special thanks to Chris and Nieves for the fun visit. Y'all are the best! 

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In the Art Room: Printed and Collaged Winter Self Portraits by Second Grade

So I kinda sorta told the kids that if they painted and printed their winter selfies really well, we just might get the magic of snow. Snow seems to elude us in these parts...but not this year. Turns out these cute things really DID bring on the snow which was totes fab...except for the fact that it meant we've been working on these bad boys for a coupla days weeks. But that's all right. I mean, just take a lil look-see at how stinkin' awesome these printed and collaged winter self-portraits are!

I knew I wanted to introduce my second graders to printmaking but how? I remembered that my buddy Laura over at this fab-o blog taught her students how to create adorable winter selfies last year. I thought it'd be fun to add the printmaking element to this lesson and viola! Here you have it!

This lesson was chuck full o' art teacherin' moments: we learned how to use the elements of art to create pattern, we learned how to make both marker and ink prints, we learned how to create a tint of blue and print snowflakes in the background, how to draw selfies and design a pleasing composition. In short, we was busy. 

Lemme break it down for you:

Day #1: Intro to carving a print. We used Scratch-Art Foam Board but styrofoam plates would work in a pinch. I had created hat and mitten templates so that we could move on to the pattern designing and printmaking faster. I have 30 minutes art classes so I have to take the guess work outta some things. After the first class, most of us had this:

Day #2: On the second day, we continued our pattern design with ink pen. I encouraged the kids to go over their lines more than once just to make sure they'd have a successful print. Early finishers colored with marker and we started to pull marker prints. You can see that in the video...if you've never done it, it's magical!

Day #3: We are ready to use brayers and ink to pull prints! I like to use water soluble Speedball ink because it's the jam. I usually lay out a couple of colors and the kids rotated creating two different color prints on colorful copy paper. (This video was created for my third graders but it's the same idea so I thought I'd share!)

Day #4: We learned how to create a tint of blue and painted a piece of construction paper. We also used cut pieces of mat board to dip into white paint and print snowflakes. It was fun to introduce the kids to a coupla printing processes.

 Day #5: Selfie time! The kids had mirrors, this idea sheet and sketch paper. They had to create three thumbnail selfie sketches before moving on to drawing on their final paper. Pink chalk was used to show just how cold it was outside!

 Day #6: Time to start assembling our collage. We had a long chat about composition and balance before going on this adventure. The kids could use their favorite prints, whether that was their marker or ink prints (we'll use the extra prints for another project, stay tuned!). I happened to have a ton of scrap paper from another project so many of the kids used oil pastels to create scarves!

Some of the girls used chalk for their long hair. 

So in love with this self-portrait! I love how vibrant the marker prints are, it made my happy when the kids chose them. 

Several students decided to arrange their composition on a horizontal format. 

 Last thing added was the pompom! For that, have the kids wrap an 18" long piece of yarn many times around a 2" piece of cardboard. Carefully slide it off and double knot tie another string around the middle. Trim the loops of yarn and you have a pompom!

Now...maybe sharing these snowy selfies here will get me one more snow day, eep!

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In the Art Room: First Grade LOVE Prints!

Thank you so much for the positive feedback on the printmaking videos, y'all! I'm so glad you liked them, found them helpful and, most importantly, had tips and tricks of your own to add. I love our great, big, fat hairy art teacherin' sharing-is-caring community! To keep up with more videos, feel free to subscribe here. Today my first grade students wrapped up their printmaking adventure with these LOVE-ly lil Robert Indiana-inspired printed and collaged pieces.

Y'all. It's January. I cannot even believe that I've gotten a Valentines-esque project knocked out already. I know some folks are all, "I don't do holiday themed projects" and I usually go ahead and nod my head but not cuz I agree (honestly, Ima go all Switzerland on that debate and stay neutral)...but cuz I can NEVER get my act together early enough to have anything ready! I mean, 'member that big We Have Heart mural we made last year? Dudes. We, like, started that on Feb 10th. 

But not this time...

CONFESSION: I had no idea what the kids were going to do with the piles of prints they were making...until seeing this piece again recently. And then I was all, yaaaazzzzz! Which, by the way, is the new Eureka! 

It's gotten around the school that the firsties have been printing maniacs in the art room. We spent two 30 minute art classes making at least 4 printed pieces. One day we worked with blue inks and the following, yellow and red. 

I told the kids "at least" because some of them just enjoyed the printing process so much that they wanted to print again and again. It's so magical! Others were well over it after the fourth print on the second day and they moved on to greener, less print-ier, pastures. 

Now, I will say, I hustled today to get the prints to the point that they could be created into these collages. I have jury duty for the next two weeks (can you hear the excitement in my typed voice? Me neither) and I didn't want any UFO's lingering around for me to return to (UFO: Un-Finished Objects). So today I trimmed all the prints at the paper cutter, organized them by kiddo and prepped the LOVE letters...

Normally I wouldn't do that much work on behalf of the kids (and my sanity...right now is the first time I've sat down all day) but, like I said, I don't like me no UFO's. To prep the letters, I made them in such a way that the kids would have minimal amount of cutting (thirty minutes, people. Thirty. Minutes). I wrote the letters in reverse so the kids could cut along those lines...but put the glue on the back (we did a little ditty: The Lines are in Black and That's the Back!). The reason behind this was I didn't want the black lines to show...but clean, crisp white letters.

The kids also had to hustle. They had to lay out their prints and decide upon a good design, glue those down, cut out their letters and glue that as well. We might have been 3 minutes late to P.E. (sorry, ladies!). 

But, oohhhhhh, the results. I mean, is it just me or are these not the most swoon-worthy thing ever? 

(Shhh, don't tell: this is my personal fave). 

And now I can go off on my jury duty adventure knowing that I don't have any UFO's in first grade floating around! Love to hear about your printmaking adventures, y'all!

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