Printmaking with Girl Scouts

Susan of Art Espirit wrote her first Whip Up post about print making with children. It was an idea I fell in love with and filed away in my memory banks for future use. Two weeks ago Leil and I carried the idea to her Girl Scout troop for work on the Printing and Graphics Badge.

I had grand plans of taking photos of the entire process from start to finish. Ha. The camera sat in my basket the whole meeting. I definitely underestimated the effort to work with 7 girls at the same time. Susan told me she did this solo with 30. Holy Smokes girl!

These are the prints that Leil and Caitlin did in our trial run at home. Susan was extremely generous with some follow on advice (thank you!). Here’s a run down of some additional tips I learned in doing this activity:

• I invested in several tubes of Speedball waterbased printmaking ink. Well worth the cost. The colors were absolutely brilliant and they dried to a professional luminous finish.
• I only had two brayers which was a bottleneck at the meeting. Next time I would borrow brayers for this type of activity.
• The butcher was going to donate the foam trays but they all had logos on them. I purchased very non eco-friendly foam plates and cut the edges off. This yields a 4 1/2″ square of foam.
• We tried several different implements to create the grooves in the foam. A ball point pen worked the best. It created a wide and deep groove without puncturing the foam. Perfect for clear prints.
• I cut 9 x 12 inch watercolor paper into four 4 1/2″ squares and 3 3″ squares. These worked really well. The final prints look very professional and the paper stayed flat after drying, perfect for a frame for Grandma.
• I cut some strips for making bookmarks. The girls really enjoyed these.
• We experimented with leaf printing too. Foam brushes worked better for applying the ink to the leaf than a brayer. Put the ink on the back side of the leaf in order to capture the leaf vein detail. Make sure the leaves are freshly collected so they don’t break during the printing process. Wet leaves were very easy to locate here in the NW!
• Do a practice run at home if you plan to do this with a group. Things I assumed would work didn’t and I was able to solve those problems before going live with the group.
• Susan reminded me that the ink would not be dry at the end of the meeting. I found large flat boxes for free at Costco and had one for each girl to carry their prints home in.

This was a very fun project. A huge hug and thanks to Susan for the inspiration. I LOVE that circle of life that exists in the craft blog world.