Printmaking

This lesson was taught to students for them to understanding and apply media, technique and process . We were given two smaller sheets of styrofoam, one was for practice and the other was for our graded project. We had to draw on our sheet of styrofoam what we wanted to make for a holiday card, we didn't necessarily have to use Christmas, but since in that holiday season I chose to draw a Christmas tree. I took my sharpie marker (cap still on) and just drew into the styrofoam the design I wanted (a tree). After doing this I had to press the rest of the area around the tree down so that the tree would stand out more because it would be outlined in white because I pressed down into the styrofoam. After I had my design drawn, area around the tree pressed down, I could go over the the other table and use the ink to make my card. We took our styrofoam design and laid it down and then chose a color of our choice. I chose green. I took some green washable ink and set it on a different piece of styrofoam and worked it into the styrofoam so it was evenly on my roller. After my roller was completely covered in green ink, I went over my design and made sure it was completely green. Then I set my piece of construction paper over top and ran another dry/clean roller over top and that pressed the ink onto the construction paper. By those two pieces pressing against each other, my tree was printed onto the construction paper, thus making my holiday card. My card didn't turn out as well as I wanted, but the teacher told me that when you press the edges down around your design it is hard to completely get the design and environment to turn out well.

An extension for this project could be to have students let their cards dry and continue to keep doing these methods over and over again. This way students would not only make the front of a card, but they could put other pictures/designs inside as well as writing or poems. After they completed this they could safely say they made their very own, hand-made card!