Halloween Art Project

For Halloween, we did a printmaking project.  I had a little bit of background with this because we learned how to do this in my college art education class.  Luckily, we had all of the supplies tucked away in our art closet.  We used foam trays, printmaking paint (it was probably very old, but it did the job), brayers, and construction paper.  I instructed the students to carve a simple Halloween design on the back of their foam tray.  Next, they used the brayer to cover it with paint.  From there, students used their foam trays as stamps to print the image on multiple sheets of construction paper.  By making multiple prints, we were able to decorate our classroom and give some prints to PTO to decorate for the Halloween party.  This was a simple project and students gained experience with something other than colored pencils and paint.  The one thing I will keep in mind is to use foam trays/plates without any imprinted symbols or words.  The trays we used had imprints on the side we didn't carve, but it still affected some of the prints.  This resulted in some of the students having to re-carve their image on another foam plate.