Print Making

This past week at art club I showed the children a couple of different printing techniques.

The first used the foam packaging you get with frozen pizzas. I managed to pick up most of these from the Scrap Store. We haven't had that many pizzas!

To prepare the print block all you need to do is draw your picture, making sure to press the pencil in to the foam. With this technique the design can be quite line-y.

And as with all printing, remember the image with appear reversed once printed. One young girl wanted to draw a bunch of numbers on her print block and she was able to draw them all in reverse.

Using a roller cover the print block with a thin layer of paint, then flip it over and print it onto paper.

The good thing about using the foam packaging is it is quite easy to wash off the paint and make more prints.

The second printing method was simply gluing cardboard cut outs onto a piece of corrugated card. To save time waiting for PVA glue to dry I glued the cardboard using a glue gun. This technique is best used with designs that are made up of bold shapes.

The paint can be applied to the print block with a roller or a paint brush. Using a paint brush is better if you want different elements of the image to be different colours. I also tried gluing tissue paper to the paper and printing on that for a different effect.

Do you have any other kid-friendly printing techniques?

Is everyone still a fan of the potato print?