4th Grade Rocking the Printshop!!!
A little history about me... I am an art teacher AND Printmaker. I love everything about Printmaking, especially the fact that it is often the unknown or misunderstood art form... Ask most people and they are unfamiliar with this art form. I work in woodcuts (using just one piece of wood and hand carving it for each color printed), and I love reductions (which forces you to start at the end and work backwards when carving and printing.) Sure, it would be easier to make a painting and call it a day, but there's just something about the challenge of making 50 or 100 of the same image so that they are perfectly identical (because we as people are not perfect :) I really wanted to do a printmaking lesson with my students, but as other art teachers will tell you, the potential for chaos in letting kids go with ink and brayers is usually more than we can handle. But our 4th graders ROCKED their printing (and loved it, too!)
We began by investigating the history and process of printmaking. We also looked at how different cultures used radial (or circular) designs in their art. The kids really enjoyed watching Tibetan sand painting!
To see this intro, click here and check out the "Oh Wha A Relief!" presentation on the Media page! :)
To create their radial design images, the students used printing styrofoam (a really great substrate for this age group because it is a lot more forgiving than wood or linoleum.) Rather than just asking them to create an image and print it,
we created radial designs- 1/4 of a design and printed it around a central point four times. But they wanted more of challenge than just printing one color... so we decided to do reductions: Print the foam in one color, draw on it some more, print again... draw some more and print a final color. Easy peasy, right?
For reference, I usually do a similar thing with my artwork, only instead of just three colors, it's more like 20- they can take weeks to print :)
Some of my work:
We began with creating 1/4 of our final design and transferring to the foam plate. We printed in our first color and then drew more designs on our plate (reducing what would be printed the second time.) After we printed again, we drew some more and printed a third time.
They turned out really beautiful!
Some pictures from the printshop and works in progress...
Their prints really turned out fabulous!!!
