There are so many sparkly symbols that enhance the celebration of winter. My favorite is the snowflake, paper snowflakes, painted snowflakes, stamped snowflakes, glittered snowflakes. We do a lot of cutting of paper snowflakes a the studio. It's a fantastic way to practices those fine motor skills while making beautiful little designs.
During our first week of Winter Camp we combined two mediums to create layered snowflake prints. The first layer was a watercolor resist.
These are really fun. We use white oil pastels to draw snowflakes on water color paper, invisible drawings that will appear only when the blue watercolor is brushed over the paper.
While the water color paintings were drying we started making our printing plates by cutting out little pieces of foam into shapes and glued them onto a round cardboard. The kids came up with so many different designs for their snowflakes, no two alike.
Once everything was dry it was time to merge all the snowflakes together. We offered both gold and silver ink onto pieces of plexi-glass for the printing of the snowflakes. Using brayers, the kids rolled the ink from the inked plates onto their foam plates, then pressed them onto the watercolor painting much like a stamp.
One, two or three snowflakes printed onto the paintings. Some kids are happy with just one but some love the sound of the brayer on the ink plate and print over and over again.
