Last night we ordered take out, which came in a bunch of styrofoam containers. So, I definitely had to recycle the styrofoam into a craft for my kids to take part in. What better than to teach them the art of printmaking?
So, printmaking is an art form where a design is carved or etched into a flat surface like wood, metal, or glass. The surface is then inked and pressed onto a material, such as paper or fabric, to create a print of the design.
We will be replicating this process by using styrofoam as our flat surface, tempura paint as our ink, and construction paper as our pressed material. Let’s get started!
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Here’s all of the material we will be using:
- Styrofoam container
- Scissors
- Washable tempura paint
- Construction paper
- Paint brushes
Directions:
- First, cut the flat top of the styrofoam container off
- Use a pointy tool to push your design into the styrofoam. We used the blunt end of our paint brush (not the end with the bristles) but you can use an unclicked pen, wooden skewer, or whatever you have available.
- Once your design has been carved in the styrofoam, you may want to go back over it a second time while pressing hard so that a deep indention is made in the styrofoam like my unicorn design below
- Next, cover the styrofoam in a thin layer of paint as evenly as possible. Make sure it’s a thin layer of paint and not caked on there. If there is too much paint, the paint will fill the carved design and no design will show up when the styrofoam is pressed to the paper
- Next, flip the styrofoam over and press the paint covered side onto your construction paper. Run your hand over the whole piece of styrofoam to make sure the full design has been pressed into the paper
- Now that you have made the original template, you can continue to ink it and press as many prints as you’d like. That’s the beauty of printmaking! So, you can see below that I pressed my print 3 more times in different colors
- If you want to get a little more advanced with your printmaking, you can paint your template multiple colors. I painted my template with rainbow stripes and pressed it.
- You can also fill in sections of the template with different colors. For example, I painted my ninja turtle’s skin green, his mask blue, and the background yellow.
Here are all of my family’s printmaking creations. My kids mainly did their carving with lines which turn out to be a pretty cool design too! I’d love to see what creations you make in my comments below!
