Star Block Prints

For the past two weeks we have been working hard on our star print art. This term the children have been experiencing different types of print making, and as the term has gone on our print making efforts have gotten more and more ambitious.

 

 Printmaking is an interesting process for children to follow. Often it's not an instant result and can require patience, not something your average 5 year old has lots of! Our cardboard prints today were part of a two step process. 

To make a cardboard print something has to be done to the 'block' before you can produce an effect on another surface - the paper. Last week we used different textured paper and card to create a cardboard block to print from, and today we printed them.

I wanted the children to understand that when you create a print you can make more than one piece of art, and that's what makes it different from other types of art. The children printed two prints today, one for school and one for home.

We cut stars, moons, suns, and other 'space' shapes to glue to our cardboard blocks. After they dried we used printing ink to roll on our blocks and printed them onto paper. 
 

We used black ink on coloured paper, but you could use coloured ink on black paper too.

Have a look at some of the other print making we have done in our classroom:

Turtle cake tin printing 
Shaving cream egg prints

Matariki star sponge prints

Apple prints

Fingerprint shamrock cards

Footprint bees

Bubble art