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? 

Night Time Skyline Painting

As well as a collaborative street drawing, the kids at Art Club on Saturday also made night time skyline paintings. This idea came from The Usborne Book of Art Ideas, another one of the many books my Mum has on the subject.

To make the painting I was going to use as the example I started by drawing a skyline on a piece of sugar paper and cut it out.

I laid the cut out on some black paper and weighed it down. Using an old toothbrush and a lollypop stick I flicked watery yellow paint over the painting.

At Art Club they used thick, bristly brushes and plastic knives to flick the paint as that's all I could find.

When I removed the cut out I was left with this. Pretty impressive.

Once the paint had dried I added window details and a reflection with coloured chalks.

This is what the kids came up with. I let them pick the colour of paint to flick with so we had white, yellow and blue lighting up the sky (and covering the tables/floor/walls).

This Week I...

...led the Saturday kids art class at the Letchworth Arts Centre. For one of the activities I rolled out a long sheet of paper for the children to draw a street scene on. They had a good time sitting on the floor and collaborating on this piece, giving each other ideas on what to add. 

   In my Mum's reception class this week they made mini pizzas using muffins as the base, so we made our own at home with the left over ingredients. Fun!

   I also finished another set of bunting. I knew I wouldn't be done with just making one set.

What did you get up to this week?