Day of the Dead Printmaking

For this art project we used the technique of printmaking. Before this lesson I had never done printmaking so I found it really fun to learn something new and also learn the things that are created using printmaking and that it was used a long time ago to make copies of things. In this specific lesson, we learned about the Day of the Dead and then used this as inspiration for our own printmaking. Once we had our drawing, we placed it on top of styrofoam so that we could create an outline in the styrofoam. Then we used a roller to cover the styrofoam in ink. We then transferred our design to paper by again using a roller to press the ink into the paper leaving the design behind.

An extension activity for this could be using this in a history class. This was how copies of something were made so you could tie this into a history lesson that talks about jobs early in America. This was probably someone's job to recreate a poster, flyer, or other piece to be distributed. You could talk about all the effort that would go into recreating a poster that now we just hit a few buttons on a copies and can get hundred of copies in a few minutes.

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