Blue to Blue in the Night: Elephant Printmaking

We've worked our way through the alphabet to the letters E and F at school and momma decided to do an art project with the letter "E" with us.  One of the only times we all sit calmly at school is when we are painting, so we did a basic printmaking project.  Momma found an elephant template on Pinterest, enlarged it, and traced that on to posterboard.  She also traced a capital letter "E" and a lowercase letter "e" she made in Word.  She then cut out pieces of the posterboard so that each piece had a traced object on it (but didn't cut out the actual shape yet).  At school, she squirted two different colors of blue and one purple fingerpaint onto the table in front of each of us.  We then got to paint the actual table with it!  We made designs, practiced a few letters, and mostly enjoyed making a big mess.  Then we pressed the posterboard down onto our portion of painted table and made a "print" of what we had drawn.

You would think momma would have remembered from our recent leaf marbling that the intent was to paint on the back of the traced object (so when she cut it out you didn't see any tracing marks).  She didn't.  But because she mounted the prints onto black paper, it didn't matter much (you couldn't see the tracing lines).  Except for the small letter "e," which she had purposefully traced backwards with the intent of printing on the back of it.  No worries -- we all loved the project so much that we did lots of extra printmaking and she was able to trace a small letter "e" onto each of our leftovers.  Cam got to do this later in the afternoon at home and she loved it, too.  By that point, momma remembered which side needed to be printed.  Cam's favorite part was picking up the paper to see the print -- there were lots of "ooooohhh"s.  I see lots of table painting in our future.