Halloween Printmaking Craft For Kids

This is an easy project – perfect to use up some of those foam sheets you most likely have piles of if you have kids.

It’s a Halloween printmaking project for kids that includes some drawing. Hopefully a very silly or scary drawing…

Materials:

• Wooden blocks or pieces of cardboard
• Halloween foam stickers or pieces of foam cut into Halloween shapes
• Sharp craft knife
• Ink pads
• Permanent extra-fine black marker
• White card stock

We used pre-made Halloween pumpkin stickers, and homemade bat and ghost shapes. Just draw your own shapes on the foam and cut them out with a craft knife. Scissors will give you a rough edge on the foam.

Affix your foam shapes to wooden blocks or cardboard, using a bit of Aleene’s tacky glue to stick them on. Or just use the sticker-backed foam and you can press them onto the wood.

After they’ve dried, make some stamps on paper and draw in your faces!

This is a great project to not take too seriously and have fun with while experimenting. Older kids can also play with shading in the pumpkins using crosshatch lines and adding crosshatch shadows, or adding some marker or paint in after they’ve stamped.

Explore what the stamps look like as a frame around the paper (you can use it to send Grandma a Halloween card), or if you have different Halloween creature stamps, make a Halloween party. Go a bit further and create a Halloween comic with these stamp beings.

We made the comic by sectioning the paper into boxes with a ruler and an extra-fine Sharpie. Your kids can either pre-plan the comic or stamp some stamps on there and then write about whatever they think up from looking at the pictures.

What other ideas do you have? This is the sort of simple activity that snowballs once you start – all sorts of ideas will come to mind, so let your kids just have at it and see what cool things happen!