Choose Your Own Adventure: Printmaking

I look forward to teaching printmaking every year and seeing the students’ eyes light up at the magical process. I was planning to make spring landscape collographs with them like these second and third grade ones from a few years ago… instead I dove into experimental mode and made three separate video tutorials for printmaking with various alternative material options. It was time intensive, but worth it as students began sending me photos of their finished prints! If you are curious about printmaking, you can see the project here and samples of their work below.

Monoprint

Styrofoam Relief Print

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This method was the popular choice! Can you spot the one inspired by a famous painting?

Collograph Print

No one chose this, despite it being the method I wanted to teach. I love the results, although coincidentally, this was the method I disliked the most in art school!

Printmaking on Repeat

Whew, it has been a busy month! I have enjoyed revisiting these lessons  from a few years ago, having made some improvements (check back here, here and here for the original posts).

5th and 6th Grade: Gelli Monoprints

To make these, we first printed a layer of texture on the gelli plates, followed by a second layer using a stencil each student made.

7th Grade: Collographs

Students made collograph plates by gluing textured materials: cardboard, felt, wallpaper, string to a cardboard surface. Students printed an edition of three prints, plus two artist proofs: one in an additional different colour, and one incorporating chine collé (tissue paper that gets glued to the paper at the same time as printing.

Once they finished printing, students covered their collograph plates with tinfoil to create a repoussee of the textures present. Colour and detail was added overtop with sharpie markers.

8th Grade: Styrofoam Relief Prints

The students created these prints by carving lines into styrofoam using a dull pencil. An edition of 3 prints were made, in addition to two artist proofs: one incorporating chine collé and one reduction print with two colours. The reduction prints were made by printing a first layer in one colour, drawing additional detail and line work on the plate and printing again overtop of the first layer in a second colour.

And, amidst all the flurry of printing with 70+ middle schoolers, I decided to host another after school workshop for my fellow teachers!

Textile Patterns from Ghana

After our unit in the caves, we flew off to a new country in West Africa; Ghana.

In first and second grade we looked at Kente cloth patterns

We started with making two patterned papers.

1. Printed gold patterns on black paper- we made printing blocks by wrapping twine around sponges

2. Painted geometric patterns using colour, line and shape

 

 

Once these papers were finished, we wove the two patterns together to create a new and intricate pattern. The black paper became our warp and the coloured was the weft strips. Weaving always goes over great- I did it with both groups last year, so this was review for most. We talked about how Kente cloth is used to make new clothes for special occasions and thought about what occasion we would make our designs for; a few students wrote artist statements about the meaning behind their finished pieces.

Third through fifth grade focused on the Adinkra symbols found on Kente cloth

We looked at examples of symbols and their meanings; and watched an artist through the process of stamping a design on cloth.

I gave the students sheets of ideas of existing symbols and encouraged to make a design of their own. They glued foam shapes onto a cardboard base.

The printing of these designs was exciting! Even after printmaking with classes this long, I still strive to make the process run more smoothly. I set up a long table in the middle of the room for inking, and each student at the remaining four tables had a number. When it was their turn, students inked their stamps in the middle and then returned to their tables to print. I encouraged them to rotate the stamps to create variation in their design and also incorporate a second symbol.

 

 

Pop Up Gallery

Around this time of year, our staff room at school could use some cheering up, and I happen to have many beautiful prints to share… so I put together a gallery display of this year’s 1st through 5th grade printmaking projects. It makes me so happy to see it all displayed and to share these finished products with the school community.

2nd/3rd Grade

4th/5th Grade

1st Grade

So Long, Winter! Collographs

We started this project shortly after returning to school in January, when it was cold and snow was imminent. It did not end up snowing much this year, but we went ahead with the idea anyway!

The students first did landscape drawings, gleaning inspiration from calendar photographs and various tree illustrations I found online. We discussed the elements of a landscape and made sure to include something in the foreground, middle ground and background of our drawings.

The idea drawings became the inspiration for a collograph print. We did a texture hunt to collect rubbings from around the classroom as research for making our plates. I had the students focus on a section of their original drawings which they recreated with various textured materials and adhered to a cardboard rectangle. They ended up having to simplify some very detailed drawings! Some of the materials we tried were craft foam, cardboard, yarn, ribbon, lace doilies, tin foil, felt… These plates by themselves are works of art! We made sure everything was glued down really well and had time to dry before our next class for printing.

Each student printed a total of one or two prints. Some of them we ended up re-inking and printing a second time overtop of the first. We managed to get everyone to print in one class period, which is an improvement on previous years! The following class, we discussed how to properly sign, title and edition the finished prints. It is always thrilling to peel back the paper and reveal a print- you can never fully envision how each piece will turn out!