Kid's Printing

FOAM PRINTING

I worked with one of my wonderful colleagues to complete these with our shared year 3/4 class.
Foam is a fabulous printmaking tool, available from most art suppliers. It is certainly one of the easiest mediums for children to print with. The blocks can be easily cut to size and drawn on with a blunt pencil or tool to create the design.

Children dyed calico for the background and then used their foam printing block to apply a border design around the outside edge. once dry, black fabric paint was used to sketch an African scene which was part of a current culture study.

SCREEN PRINTING

If you are lucky enough to have access to screen printing frames, then this is a great project to work on with primary aged students. It is a little messy, but its a great way to explore the viscosity of paint and learn to layer colours and patterns.

With these 10-11 year old students, we used torn and cut paper, adding more layers and shapes each time they pushed paint through the screen onto the fabric. They then folded and cut their final design (in the same way you would make paper snowflakes).

BLOCK PRINTS - CARDBOARD

These print blocks were made by seven and eight year olds. The process involved cutting and gluing layers of thick card on top of each-other, then rolling with printing ink before pressing the design onto paper.  Tapa designs are quite a simple theme to work from. The more complex the design, the more difficult the process will be. Keep it simple! The animal prints linked with a relevant learning inquiry and students loved doing these. They were printed onto plain calico fabric, but could also be done on card or paper.

LINO PRINTING

Lino printing is best done with older students as it can be challenging and it's easy to injure yourself! I have no photos of work I have done with students, but these are my personal samples I have used to motivate and teach with. I use these to highlight how versatile one simple lino cut block can be if you use rotation and print multiple images, varying colour and position. The same concept works well using block or foam prints. It's a great way to integrate mathematical concepts into your art programme.

The simple lino cut design.

Printed on calico, sponge technique with paint adds interest.

Experimenting with position and colour. Each section has the same print

used twice in opposing directions.

SCREEN PRINTING - TORN PAPER

This is a year 4 child's sample of a torn paper screen print. They used yellow as a base coat, then pulled green through the still damp paint with the paper overlay.

SCREEN PRINTING - NATURE PRINT

In this example I used torn and cut paper as a base, as well as leaves, grass etc from the environment. A good idea for autumn art if you have screens available. Stick to an autumn colour scheme.