Styrofoam Printmaking with Molly

Well, if I don't start somewhere I'll never get started again.  Ya know?  And since, it seems, my life is now only recorded by cell phone pics, I'm starting at the most recent end of my camera roll and working my way back to try and catch y'all up a bit.

First up, a super cool craft we used for Christmas presents this year.  And no, this wasn't inspired by a Pinterest find (I haven't had time for any Pinterest surfing anyhow) but rather the craft at this year's cowboy festival.  This year they made landscape prints and they were so easy, cheap, and came out so impressively that Karma, Kara and I decided to have the kids recreate the project at home to make stationary for grandparents and great-grandparents.  It's a technique I'm sure I've done before as a kid but I was happy to come upon it again at the festival and Molly had a great time with it too.  I'm sharing Molly's part of that here.

The first step is drawing a picture on thin styrofoam.  The two on the left were done on small (new) meat trays from Publix and the two on the right were done on pink styrofoam plates that I had cut to the size of the cards we were making.

She drew the pictures with a regular pencil.  She wanted to draw a snowman and was really frustrated by not being able to draw a good circle because the pencil kept getting snagged on the styrofoam.  I got out some round cookie cutters and those were just the thing to make the circles and save her frustration!

After you draw the pictures you color them in with water-based markers (we used Crayola and Ikea brand markers).  The important thing is to make sure you color the entire surface of the styrofoam or you'll end up with a lot of white space--that is unless you want something to be white (like the snowman for instance).  It also helps to draw a border around the outside to define your print.

"A Christmas tree with all the Charlie Brown Christmas trees all around it".  (She's referring to the Christmas tree lot that CB visits with all the multi-colored aluminum trees etc.)

After you've drawn and colored the styrofoam you need to dampen the paper you want to transfer your print onto.  In this case it was a half sheet of cardstock.  Then simply press the styrofoam onto the dampened paper, press down firmly all over the design, lift carefully, and there you have your very own print!  (I didn't think to use a printmaking roller to help with this but I have one and I think I'll use it next time!)

"A snowman with a hat kinda like Santa"

"Outer Space with a planet (blue) and shooting stars and a rocket"  My fave is the two-tone purple sky.

"A kitty in a basket playing with yarn (green)"

 After she'd done the hard work of drawing the design and coloring it, she was over the novelty of the project which left it up to me to reproduce them all.  All I did was recolor the design (based on the colors she'd already chosen) for each print I needed to make.

Snowmen and Christmas trees drying

Outer space and Kitties in baskets drying

I also added a little nameplate print to the back so her name would be on them.  This had to be written backwards so I wrote the "made by" and I traced her actual signature for the Molly part.  (For the last 6ish weeks her signature has included a "y" whose tail underlines the rest of her name.  It's my favorite thing;)
The last step was adding the envelopes (bought in a box of 50 from Walmart in a size just bigger than a half sheet of cardstock.  Yay.) and tying them into cute little notecard bundles perfect for gifting to all the GPs!

Ready for gifting!