On these stay-at-home wintery days, a fun art activity we’ve recently re-discovered is printing! Not the handwriting type, but the Gutenberg type! Taking something that sticks up, smearing some wet paint on it and pushing it down on a piece of paper. Viola! A print.
Printing projects can be done quickly, with relatively little mess and lots of nice, colorful results. Rubber stamping, the most common printing craft, has always been great fun for children. Printing with your own stuff merely opens up the possibilities of what to use for the “stamp”–something that has a surface that is raised.
There are lots of good printing materials. Just think texture. The most basic printing is hand-printing. Some children love to get messy. For this type of child, hand printing is great fun. The child can put their palm down in paint, or for more creative fun, a parent can paint the child’s hand (or foot!) before it goes down on a clean piece of paper for printing. Obviously, some children will not tolerate the sensation of paint on their hands. They may enjoy some of the other types of textured materials.
Before moving into more creative printing materials, the classic printing objects are apples and potatoes. Children enjoy carving designs on their surfaces and dipping them in paint then printing them on paper.
The more interesting printing projects are also the more creative ones. Look for anything with a textured surface for your printing materials. Leaves, sticks, marbles, toys with interesting textures, kitchen utensils, toothbrushes, old shoes, tin cans. As long as you use water soluble paint like tempera, you can use anything with a stick-up texture to print because the paint will wash off. (Although oil paint is easier to print with, it is also much harder to clean up!) Once you’ve painted your stick-up items or pushed them into the paint, print away. Repetition of the printed object makes easy designs and interesting pictures.
A little more challenging project for older kids has a very satisfying outcome. Onto a clean sheet of heavy paper, like watercolor paper, the child can glue flat, but textured objects. We used leaves with the ribbed side up, crumpled, flattened foil, paper towel, and strips of fabric, scrunched and flattened plastic wrap. We painted glue on top of the objects to secure them to the paper. The key is that the objects are reasonably flat after the gluing is done.
After the textured papers dried via air or the blow dryer on low, we painted them all over with crazy, wild colors of our liking. Then we carefully inverted our paper and printed the colored side on a clean sheet of heavy white paper which we pressed down and rubbed hard with the back of a spoon so that the paint would be pressed onto the clean paper.
On a cold, rainy, wintery day, printing is a fabulous way to invigorate the hours. While it’s a fun project for one, groups of kids really enjoy printing together. They often inspire each other with their creativity. And the project can be as messy (hand painting) or as tame (potato printing) as your mood allows.
Gutenberg had a good idea back then, and it’s still good today!
-Posted by Donna Detweiler, who suggests you pop your kid’s best print into a cheap plastic box frame available at Target or Wal-Mart and watch them beam with pride.
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