5 Easy Art Projects: Cardboard Prints

Published: September 14, 2013

5 really easy and cool art projects for kids

Hi! I took a quick break yesterday to switch blogs for a Hispanic Heritage Month post, but I’m back with day 5 of Easy Art Projects for kids. We made cardboard prints for this project. I’ll bet you have some cardboard lying around, am I right?

printmaking- cardboard printmaking is a great way to introduce kids to printmaking • Artchoo.com

Printmaking may be the best way ever to get a kid interested in art. You can make prints with virtually anything that will take paint, and it’s always fun to see what the results are. Plus, you can usually take the prints a step further and experiment with adding any number of mediums to get all sorts of cool art!

There are loads of different printmaking techniques, and while monoprints might be the easiest to make, cardboard prints are totally simple as well.

Materials:

  • Cardboard
  • Scissors
  • Paint or ink (we used acrylics)
  • White paper (we used drawing paper- use something thicker than printer paper.)
  • Brayer (roller)

Directions:

Cut your cardboard up into shapes.

Glue them to a larger piece of cardboard. (Aleene’s tacky glue is awesome.)

Easy art projects for kids: cardboard printmaking from Artchoo.com

printmaking with cardboard

After they are dry, spread ink or paint evenly over them with your brayer, place a piece of paper over them and rub.

Making prints with cardboard - easy art projects from Artchoo.com

It will probably take 2-3 paint applications and test prints before you get a good print- the paint needs to saturate the cardboard enough so it doesn’t dry out too quickly. Just keep rolling paint on and printing until you get some good prints.

printmaking with cardboard! Artchoo.com

We made a few using different colors. It’s easy to mix up colors right on your palette by squirting out paint and rolling it back and forth with the brayer.

Important: Make sure whenever you peel the paper off you squeal in delight!

Printmaking with kids- using cardboard shapes • Artchoo.com

See all 5 Easy Art Projects:

Day 1: Folded Paper Marker Drawings

Day 2: Inky Chalk Pastel Drawings

Day 3: Spray Paint T-shirts

Day 4: Smiley Face Paintings

Day 5: Cardboard Prints

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11 thoughts on “5 Easy Art Projects: Cardboard Prints”

    • Cardboard was really fun for printmaking- it’s a whole different project when you can cut your shapes out of something as opposed to carving them into something. Although I like both ways. 🙂

      Reply
  1. Just cut up some cardboard for my son’s painting/stamping project; thanks for the idea Jeanette! I also love the design of your blog; very clean and well laid out 🙂

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    • Oh- how did they turn out!? I’m so excited you tried this. Did he have fun? And thank you a ton for the blog compliment. I sort of obsess over the design, and can’t stop tweaking things on it every few days.

      Reply

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