Mono Printing

While some of my Art Club artists were making melted crayon prints, others were making monoprints. We used thrifted picture frames with glass, block printing ink, copy paper, and a brayer. 

I'm on a circle kick, so we used the CD to trace around and cut out two circles. They were to draw two things that don't go together on one of them. Like a lightning bolt and a tennis shoe. A flower and a frying pan. The sillier the better.

One of my helpers, Robyn, came up with the idea of making a paper shield to keep the kids from getting ink on their hands while they traced their drawings to make their print. She cut out the circle in the middle of a full sheet of paper that had been folded in half. Once the ink was brayered onto the glass of the picture frame, the shield was placed, then the plain paper circle fit in the hole. Their drawing circle was placed on top for them to trace.

For some of my classes, we just used the smaller square frame and paper squares.

In the busy classrooms, I failed to get photos of their finished prints!

We also used thrifted rubber stamps to make a mini stamped mosaic as a "when-you-are-finished" piece. I brought one color of inkpad (black), a bunch of rubber stamps, and colored cardstock scrap. They were to choose three stamps, three colors of paper. Then they glued the  repeated images to a background paper mosaic-style. Simple, but they really admired the artwork of the stamps.

So our printmaking unit included: Foam Plate Portraits, Mono Prints, Cooked Crayon Prints, and Rubber Stamp Mosaics. (And then it was on to pencil drawing! More about that next week!)