Pop Art Prints

I had all of the third grade students print their design in which ever color they wanted on this huge sheet of paper to replicate Andy Warhol's "100 Soup Cans."

Finally busted out the foam printing plates that I've had pulled out for a month or two.  The third graders studied some printing techniques such as woodcut and linoleum printing.  We even got a little art history as we looked at some prints from the master, Mr. Albrect Durer.  The students could not believe that his prints were cut from wood!! Then we shifted to some contemporary artists and ended up looking at Andy Warhol's oh so "POP"ular POP art.  The students loved the soup cans and as we talked about them, I explained that we too would be making POP art from some everyday items, but since we are in art class, we will be choosing something in the art room to draw a still life of. 

Students started by making some sketches and still life drawings of whichever object they chose.  After they felt comfortable, I had them put their "perfected" drawing on a 4"x6" paper which is the same size as our printing plate.  I really wanted to stress the printing aspect of this project and how the image becomes an inverse when printed, so I had students involve at least one word in their print.  It could either be a word that was already on the object they drew or if their object did not have any words they could choose a related word and use it in the background.  I gave a demonstration of how the inverse works so students had a better understanding of the "reflection" principal.  I then had all the students take their smaller drawings and put it against one of our many classroom windows and use it as a tracing table.  Students flipped their papers to the backside and traced all the pencil lines onto the backside so it was a perfect inverse. 

After finishing the inverse drawing, students taped them to their foam printing plate and began tracing all their lines with a wooden scratch stick.

In the following class, we began printing.  I had all students come back and watch me make a couple of prints.  We used a breyer and printing ink for this and it worked great.  I stressed making sure that we got a nice even layer of ink on our printing plate and making sure that the plate didn't move or wiggle once we set it down.  Students were making four different colored prints on the same paper and I set out five different colors so students could choose.