A Printing Lesson

Here's the last art lesson I taught in my granddaughter's third grade class.  We made prints from a "plate" we created with flat found objects glued to a mat board.

I had the student's smear the glue onto their mat board like a thin layer of icing, plenty of glue to adhere the found objects and then more glue from the bottle if they built up a second layer--(three layers would be too high for the printing)

I took the plates home after they dried so I could spray them with a coat of clear acrylic.  One of the prints we made is an embossing using a damp piece of paper--without the acrylic coating, the paper would stick to the plate.

I've found the best way to get a good clear embossed image, (when you don't have a printing press), is to sit on it!  The kids liked this part.

Our first print was a rubbing with an oil pastel on a thin and flexible paper, the second print was the embossing using white construction paper dipped in water and blotted with a towel, the third print was done with paint--we painted the plate to print on the orange construction paper--some students made another print using their paper towel (this was done without adding any more paint), which came out to be sort of a print and an embossing at the same time.  For display, I collected everything and strung them to hang with their plates at the top.

There's a lot of prep for this lesson and if I were teaching many classes again, I wouldn't be stringing these up for display--takes too long, but I now only volunteer in my granddaughter's class, so I'm doing some things that take a little longer.