Prints Charming: Summer Craft Camp for Kids

My July Craft Camps for Kids ages 4 to 8 focused on print-making and interesting ways to make prints onto paper. 

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we began our sessions together with fingerprint art and bubble wrap prints.  Did you know that bubble wrap painted with yellow paint and then pressed onto a piece of paper looks just like a honeycomb?  Make a little thumbprint bee or two over top of it, and you have a pretty little project!

Here the artists are, painting the bubble wrap with yellow paint...


And here they are beginning to press it to the card to get a print:

Once that was done, they could add thumbprint bees, a fun message (like "Bee happy!" or "You're beeautiful!"), and any other embellishments:





We also made some black thumbprint spiders hanging from their webs (great for Halloween or messages like, "Let's hang out together sometime!"), and then had free time to play with some of the finger- and thumb-print ideas from Ed Emberley's Fingerprint Drawing Book. 

Once the kids got underway with their thumbprinting and drawing, they had such amazing attention, and worked in such silence, only talking to pass ink pad colors around the table to one another.  It was pretty impressive!

We made clay stamps with our own designs for print-making etched into them with toothpicks, but I didn't get any photos while we were working on these.  I didn't think they ended up making very good prints, but the kids all assured me that they liked that part of the workshop.  I'm pretty sure everyone just likes getting their hands on clay!

I also wanted to show them how we can make prints from everyday, and sometimes unexpected, objects, with colorful and pretty  results.  I collected all sorts of circular items from around my house--empty toilet paper rolls, milk bottle lids, Play Doh container lids, electrical parts (you know the little plastic pieces that you tuck the ends of electrical wires into?), small paper cups--anything I could get my hands on that would make a circle print on the paper.  Everyone had a plate of red, blue, and yellow paint, and they "had at it" to make circle prints on their great big pieces of paper. 

It was so much fun that I made my own circle print later that evening, throwing green paint into the mix.

I wanted to make solar prints, cork prints, vegetable prints...I have enough ideas to fill a couple more print-making workshops with no trouble!  I am hoping to find some young people interested in joining me for art-making through the fall.