Third Grade Relief Prints

The third graders have been studying relief printmaking in art class. They learned that relief printing is the oldest form of printmaking. An artist can carve into a variety of materials, wood, metal, styrofoam, even a potato, to create their plate or matrix. The plate is then inked up with printing ink and a print is pulled on paper. The raised surface on the plate prints. In their homeroom classes, the students have been studying monuments, so they used a famous monument for their subject matter. The third graders used styrofoam to create their plates and used both markers and printing ink to print a series of four. They also learned how to correctly label a print, using the artists name, edition number, and title.