quick winter printmaking project for artsonia

My middle school has joined Artsonia this year. It has been going really well. 

I felt I needed to post a winter themed project for my parents. 

I did a quick printmaking project with 6th, 7th, and 8th grade, using 5 x 7 styrofoam.

The theme was snowpeople. 

6th grade had a choice of:

-included a border 

or 

-having a larger snowperson in the foreground and a hill or landscape background 

(see top row below)

7th grade:

I encouraged to draw one or more snowmen from a worm's perspective. For the kids that chose to follow my strong suggestion they came out really great. Some of the kids did other spins on the idea. 

(below)

8th grade: 

These guys have done styrofoam printing with me. I showed them some inspiration examples of different scenes and snowmen illustrations and they could design as they liked. 

(shown in the title image) 

Some of my parents ordered holiday cards and ornaments with the prints which was my hope! 

View the full gallery here. 

Extra Large Acorns

This was a quick, easy, and successful lesson focused on printing, texture, & earth tones. 

Day one - draw the shape of the acorn on a 9x12 paper taking up the entire space. 

 Students painted around the outline with black tempera and then printed with cardboard strips dipped in black tempera to create the acorn top texture. 

 Day Two- introduction to Earth Tones. Students mixed different shades of brown by mixing brown, white, and orange. They painted in the top part first, using the printed lines as a guide. 

 Then most students made an attempt at color blending and mixing more shades of brown to fill in the bottom. 

 We are going to cut them out this week and hang them on the giant tree in the hallway. 

Printmaking with Recycled Trays

I found that one of my third grade classes was attempting to recycle their 20 breakfast trays by making a mountain of them that overflowed into the hallway. 

I encouraged them to try stacking them up so they would take up much less room. 

I also started to take the rinsed and stacked trays to use for paint palettes. 

This inspired me to do a styrofoam tray recycling project with the third grade students.

We used the trays to make printing plates rather than the styrofoam sheets we often order. 

The students drew designs and pictures (no numbers or letters) on each section. 

The first printing task was to color each section with marker and print it on white paper. 

When they had printed all of their sections in colored marker I rolled black ink onto their plate and each student printed it on to the large brown paper to make a collaborative piece. 

Pop Art Leaves

This was a lesson I did with second graders two years ago that I wanted to share because it was a big hit.
The project had two parts.  The first part was a color mixing study and investigation into analogous colors.
The students chose a set of analogous colors that represented fall foliage colors.  We talked about how analogous colors are three "neighbor" colors on the color wheel and sometimes use the rhyme "three colors in a row, just like winning tic tac tow".  The students printed large dots using corks dipped in tempera paint.

We studied the work of Roy Lichtenstein (which is why we included the dot patterning) and Andy Warhol and discussed what the phrase "Pop Art" means.

The other part of the project was based on observational drawing.  The students observed the leaves, and drew in pencil and then traced in black pen.  They had to cut the contour of the leaf carefully and create a composition with their background when they glue-stick'ed them on.