Easter Egg Printing

I've been wanting to to try printmaking with my preschooler for awhile now.  After seeing this great  Easter Egg Printing post from The Artful Parent, I thought I'd give styrofoam printing a try.  Styrofoam printing is cheap and doesn't (really) need any special materials.   Sounds great, right?   Today's Easter craft is making these neat Easter Egg Prints with your kiddos.

Egg-cellent Easter Egg Printing!

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Materials Needed

• Paint 
• We used Tempera paint and Craft paint because we didn't have printing ink 

• Styrofoam plates 
• We used take out containers, but you could also buy sheets of printing foam

• Dull Pencils  (To mark up your plates)

• Trays (To hold our paint)

• Print roller and paint brushes

• Paper to print on
• We used Drawing paper and cardstock for our "real" prints and computer paper (as our test paper)

Quick Side Note:

I apologize for the lack of photos of the actual printing process.  Today's activity was inspired by two great bloggers' posts:

• Artful Parent's Easter Egg Printing Post
• Art Bar's Styrofoam Printing Post

Both blogs show wonderful photos of their kids actually doing the process, so check out them out if you feel confused!

Making Easter Egg Prints with kids:

• First, I took some styrofoam take out containers and cut out egg shapes.  (If you want to try this project out with a whole bunch of kids, you could buy printing foam  for everyone.)  

• Then, we took dull pencils and drew designs on our eggs.  (My four year old had a tough time understanding why he was drawing designs with pencils.  He kept wanting to draw with Sharpie markers.  Looking back, I should have showed him examples of kids printmaking first so he would understand why it was important to use pencils to make indentations.)

•  I set up two work areas- one area to do the actual painting/ rolling and the other area to do the printing.  I covered both areas with cut-up brown paper bags.   This way the printing area would be clean.

• First, we tried using tempera paint.  I squirted out tempera paint onto a plastic tray and we used the roller and paint brushes to apply the paint onto our styrofoam eggs. Then, we made prints with them onto our practice paper (aka our computer paper) to get a feel for what it would be like before using our nice paper (Drawing paper and cardstock)  

Here's what one of these tempera paint prints looked like!

• My son then got bored of the activity and ran away to play Lego.  So I tried using some craft paint to make prints.  I just painted on the colors.  

Oh!

To make the prints as sharp as they could be, you could use the back of a wooden spoon to rub over your styrofoam eggs.  We didn't have one specifically for printing, so I just taped the blades of a scissor together and rubbed the handles against the styrofoam egg to make sure all my paint evenly transferred.

Here's what the prints with craft paint looked like:

More Preschool Egg Activities and Crafts

Here are some more great egg-themed activities to try out with your preschoolers!

• Tin Foil Easter Egg Art | I Heart Crafty Things
• Easter Egg Paper Collage Craft | A Little Pinch of Perfect
• Easter Egg Sequencing Tasks | School Time Snippets
• Beginning Sounds Easter Egg Hunt | Artsy Momma
• Creative Easter Egg Drawing Prompts | Handmade Kids Art

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Happy making, friends!