Andy Warhol Endangered Animal Elementary Art Project

 

Our 3rd grade students are in an animal unit and they were interested in doing some Andy Warhol inspired art.

You will need:

White paper

Pencils and erasers

Foam plates

Water based Block printing ink

Breyers and plexiglass for rolling the ink

Colored pencils to add color to the print 

A blow dryer if you can't let them dry before coloring

Background paper in bright colors

Although Andy used screen printing we will use a block printing process to make ours.

Students will draw their animal on copy paper and then tape them to foam plates.  

I buy regular foam plates at the store and cut the edges off to get a nice square or round flat piece of foam.

I made stencils of the outside shape of the animals in the size of the foam plates.  That gives them a head start on the inside details.

These are the stencils I made:

Once they have chosen their animal, (and if they don't want to use the stencil they don't have to) they can start filling in the details inside the shape.  I put the Warhol art on the screen for them to refer to and also showed them black and white versions to help them find the lines.  I demonstrated how to add the details  by finding the clues the shape gives you.

This simplifies the animal and makes it less intimidating to draw.

After they draw their animal and we tape it to the foam they trace over their drawing making a light impression on the foam.

Then they remove the paper and retrace their animal deeper into the foam to create distinct lines for better print quality.

This is the faint image after tracing, below is the inked plate after retracing the lines deeper.

Here is the print before color is added using colored pencils.

When the students are ready to color their print we talk about warm and cool colors.  If you print with a cool color of ink like we did then warm colors will really PoP, but you can also still use cool colors.

We also talked about complimentary colors, and layering colors like Andy Warhol does.

Below are my students amazing examples: