Easy Leaf Monoprints

 This is a simple mono-printing technique I learned in my childhood which I suddenly recalled this year and decided to try with my grade 2 students.

Students folded a piece of paper in half and thickly coloured one half of the page with various brightly coloured oil pastels. Once they had filled the page, I gave them a black crayon and asked them to colour over their coloured page as thickly as they could, aiming to have no colour showing through. This is the same technique one would use for scratch art. It seems to need to be black crayon and not oil pastel to work properly. 

We then folded the page in half again so that the coloured page was on the left side, inside.

I then had students make detailed observational line drawings from leaves we had previously collected from the school grounds. Once they had sketched the leaves lightly, students needed to ensure they had retraced all their lines in pencil, pressing hard so as to ensure the lines were being printed through on the inside of their page. 

Once they opened their page they now had their original drawing on the outside and a positive/negative mono-print of their drawings on the inside.

This is one of those fun projects where the kids can't predict the outcome and it seems like magic. It can also work with any drawing.

Ming Vase Scratch Art

Thank you Miriam at arte a scuola for this amazing idea based on iconic blue and white ceramics of unusual shapes from China's Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

My grade 5 students used pictures of Ming vases as a reference when drawing their own large symmetrical vessel. They then filled in their shape with layers of blue oil pastel in various shades. They then painted the shape with a couple of layers of white paint before using a wooden skewer to scratch in their drawings. 

 

Klimt Scratch Art

 

Image via Klimt Tree of Life

This project is inspired by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt's 1909 painting 'Tree of Life' (pictured left). Students created their own piece of scratch art paper (instructions HERE if you need to find out how to do this). They then used Klimt's painting as inspiration to draw a tree which used the entire space and explored line. The end results remind me of something from 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'.

Scratch Art Whales

These whale crayon etchings were made recently by a class of grade 3s. We made our own 'Scratch-LIte' paper rather than buying the plastic sheets. If you haven't done this before and would like to try it, all you need to do is cover a page entirely using coloured oil pastels or crayons and then paint the page with a coat of black paint (student acrylic works fine). Once dry we used nails and wooden skewers to draw into the black paint, revealing the colours the students used underneath. If you stick these up on windows they look amazing with the light glowing through the colours.