Evergreen Forest Collagraph prints, 3rd grade

Winter (almost) greetings! This printmaking lesson is a tradition for my 3rd grade classes over the years because it is always fun, successful, and you can use a wide variety of materials. Search my blog for more examples from years past.

 This year, we used matboard that was donated by Artome, who frames our art show each year. We added different shapes of evergreen trees in a snowy ground, and a hole puncher is a great way to get the effect of berries, cones, or decorations. We used lacy paper doilies and scraps of printing foam - some other great materials to try are craft foam, yarn, corrugated paper, and sandpaper. Make sure the pieces are glued down well. I use Blick block printing ink - when the final print has been pulled, we dust the plate with a layer of sparkly clear glitter and it becomes its own work of art as well. A few of the final prints also have some blue ink mixed in because we were getting low on white and it turned out great! I think we will continue that happy accident in the future.