Printmaking is actually one of my favorite activities. Unfortunately it didn't catch on as well as I thought it should have.

We did a few basic printmaking activities which I wrote out onto the board to give them an idea of what printmaking is and the different ways we can do it. Different ages were introduced to different activites.

Before they were introduced to stamping we went through the different ways they can use stamps as depicted in the chart below.

First graders start off with stamping found materials. They are given black paint so they can concentrate on the stamping activity along with pattern making without getting distracted by color.

Another stamping activity is using store bought stamps. Years ago I would never have given my students stamps like this, but I have come to realize that they can do lots more with these stamps than thought and they do end up incorporating the stamps into other pictures.

Next up was making their own stamps. The younger grades make collogrpahs. Those are pieces of craft foam cut up and pasted onto a background to create a large stamp.

Older children created images with their foam pices.

Once they are finished peeling and sticking the foam pieces down to make their (collographs/stamps) they then color on top with washable markers. We spritz a piece of paper with water and they smooth the collograph onto the paper getting the image of the foam pieces.

Next was marker prints using relief printing.

Relief printing is when you etch into a piece of foam lay down color and then print onto a piece of paper.

We used the foam in 2 ways. First we etched onto the foam pieces (you can use cut up styrofoam trays if you don't want to spend money on buying the inovart foam pieces that we use)

For the first type we do the marker prints by coloring with markers, spritzing the paper and rubbing the foam onto the paper getting the impression we had drawn.

With relief prints the parts that are drawn are what is left white in the final picture.

We then used those thin foam plates with regular printing ink. The children either drew new pictures on new foam or they used the same foam that they had used with the markers to show the different ways of printing.

I only have a few colors of ink, but the learn the process of rolling ink with a brayer onto a piece of plexiglass, then using the brayer to roll over their plate and then they turn over the plate and rub it over the paper transferring the image.

The last type of printmaking activity was introduced only to the older children and is called monoprinting.

Monoprinting is when you roll paint over a surface, create designs or pictures, lay a piece of paper over this, rub it and pull the print.

It is called monoprinting because you can only pull one print from this image (sometimes you can get a second lighter one called a ghost print)

We used  a certain product that is like a block of rubber to create our prints.

Below is an entire assortment of the various forms of printing that were done with the above techniques.