Alligator Floral Block Print

In the afternoon children's art class today, I had the kids do a wood-cut, but without the wood (or the sharp instruments necessary for a traditional wood-cut).

Instead, I found some of those green foam blocks that are used in flower arranging - they're very finely-textured styrofoam, so I thought they'd work well, and they have six sides, so we could use each side for a different design.
We drew our design into the foam block and then I had the kids gouge out the design with the butt of a small watercolour brush. Then we painted the blocks with acrylic and pressed them onto paper! It worked great, and gave the kids a fun introduction to traditional printing methods.

The alligators were my example. I also did some cats. Fun stuff, and an inexpensive project kids will enjoy. ^_^

I'll Scrap this later. If you're interested, I have a lot of ideas for kids' art in my Scraps and in the Scraps for my other account,