Styrofoam Printing

One of the things I am really enjoying about printmaking is that it has that it has this incredibly awesome low-tech side to it that allows for making prints out of easy, "non-artistic" material. When I taught 6th grade in Louisiana, I co-taught an art class with my good friend. We did some small printing using gum erasers as a medium, pencils/paper clips for carving, and markers for ink. Cheap, low-tech, and easy. Potato stamping is another great example, near and dear to many people's hearts, as they recall classroom memories from elementary school.

Another beautiful and simple material is styrofoam.

When I bought something this past summer (and for the life of me, I have no idea what it was), it came in a hulking piece of white styrofoam as packaging. I was about to toss the styrofoam, but instead thought, "Wait, I bet I can use this for a class!" I work at a school where we do all project-based learning, and so I'm always collecting random materials that "might come in handy." Turns out that keeping the styrofoam was a good decision.

Yesterday, my student and I explored carving and printing with the styrofoam. It was truly a learning experience, and involved some creative problem solving. First, we tried just "drawing hard" into the foam to create a lined image, but we discovered that the styrofoam was created from small circles or balls of foam, and so it had a texture into which you couldn't carve a uniform line -- you basically has to "push down" the tiny circles to form your image.

Once we got past that hurdle, we went about creating our images. In the mood for Halloween, I envisions a bit of a Grendel character roaring. But as I went to carve his roar, I remembered one of my previous oopsies -- in relief printing, the print is backwards from the stamp, so I had to reverse the word in my head before I carved it into the foam. Crisis averted.

My finished block appears below (this is a post-printing picture, so it does indeed have paint stains!)



After the carving, we jumped right into printing. At school, we have a collection of acrylic paints, which dry quickly, so we had to work relatively fast in "inking" our blocks. I wanted to print on black construction paper, so went with a cream color for my print. The first inking turned out less-than-satisfactorily:



I couldn't read the ROAR!, my little guy's green color hadn't printed, and it was just too light. We moved on, and decided that a heavier inking was necessary. Try 2 was a vast improvement:



Much better, much more legible! We decided on a final try, with even more paint on the block, and came up with this final image:



Success. And quite cute, if I do say so myself.

Sure, it's nothing that's going to win any awards, but it has good contrast, good texture, and was virtually free to produce (construction paper and acrylic paint are cheap, and the foam was literally free!).

While I appreciate the more technical aspect of printmaking, I'm starting to see the beauty in simplicity, too.

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