5th Grade Printmaking in Progress

Fifth grade girls are nearing the end of their first project, which involved drawing a stylized animal or flower design, carving into a rubber printing plate with a tool called a gouge, and then printing on colored paper with printing ink. The room is always bustling during this process, as you can see below. Along the window, prints hang to dry on the laundry line: Here, students are carving more from their plates after making a "test print," which showed them where to go back and give a little more TLC:

One students applies pink ink to her plate with a special roller called a "brayer," while the other student gently rubs paper on top of the inked surface of her plate:

A print hot off the "press":

In another class this week, the girls used bleeding tissue paper and spray bottles to create warm and cool dyed paper, which we will use as a printing surface in another class. I always think it's cool when you can make not only the carved relief plate, but even the paper you print on!