Printing and Poppy Flowers

November is printmaking month in the art room.  With the younger grades the projects are usually mono-prints with collographs and relief prints for the older grades.  I am a person that requires experiment and change and am bored teaching the same lesson over and over.  This year was time for change so I began perusing the internet and pinterest for new ideas and ways to teach printmaking.  I found a really cute monster project here that used a marker and coffee filter print.  I like the method but didn't want to do monsters.  With Veteran's Day coming up, I thought of poppy flowers.  In my research, I discovered that poppy flowers are only associated with Memorial Day not Veteran's Day but the project was born regardless.  Here are some visual steps to creating the finished printing and collage project.

Begin by ironing the filters to flatten, then have students add color with yellow and red to the filter.

Spray the filter with water which has been placed on a sheet of white paper.  Place a 2nd paper on top and rub to transfer the inks to the papers.  This is the printing process.  You can iron them to rush the drying process or leave them to dry on your dry rack for week two.  Next the students used some scrap greeting cards to create organic shapes to trace to create the petals of the poppy flowers.  These were traced on the filter and printed papers.

I had students to draw grass and stems on a dampened sheet of 9x12 paper to create a field for the flowers.  I chose to dampen the paper so the watercolors would run to mimic the color patterns of the prints.  Poppy flowers  have 4-6 petals; shapes were chosen to create each flower.  Once flowers were in place, a black water based marker was used to dot in the centers of the flowers, accentuate some of the grass and stems and outline the flower petals.

Color pencils in shades of green can be used to add in a few buds.  This was a very successful and fun-filled lesson!