Day 35. Year of the Ox monoprints

I finally remembered to take the camera to school so I could take a picture of the prints that DD and her classmates made last week. I'm the class Art Parent, and this month tried to combine an art lesson with a CNY activity.

Monoprints are made by rolling paint onto a "canvas" of some sort, such as styrofoam meat trays or cheap plastic placemats, then "drawing" their picture by scraping away the paint with a Q-tip. Once that's done, a sheet of construction paper is placed over the canvas, patted down, then peeled up, which means that the words have to be "written" in mirror image in order to appear correctly in the end. The kids each got to choose any two colors of paint for their print, which they blended into a third color, and they had to include three things: 2009, Year of the Ox, and the Chinese symbol for Ox. Some of the prints turned out better than others.

When asked afterwards what they learned, some of the responses were: Red and green are not good colors to blend. Neither are blue and orange, which is very unfortunate given they are the colors of our local college football team and a good number of these 3rd graders are fans, including my own little one. Oh, and it is very tricky to write backwards in mirror image.