Weaving with Monotypes

I have been doing a lot of clay and other messy projects lately, so I thought what better than printmaking to get my tables clean at the end of the day. I started by teaching my first graders a little bit about suminagashi, the Japanese paper marbling technique. Suminagashi translates to floating ink and it can create wonderful, vibrant marbled papers. While this was a great inspiration for our process, it wasn't a technique I believed the average first grade student could master. I also took inspiration from Helen Frankenthaler's "soak and stain" method of abstract expressionism. For this project, students started by making monotypes. I sprayed all the tables, and students painted in the puddles, then they pressed their papers to the paint. Essentially they were using the tables like giant stamps. The result was wonderful prints that seemed somewhat marbled, and somewhat like color field paintings. Each student made three prints this past week. One print was made up of mostly warm colors, one cool colors and one neutral colors. In my room, students sit at tables arranged in pods. We have 4 pods, so one was a warm color station, one cool, and one neutral. The remaining table group was used for clean stuff (writing names on papers, then self directed art time for early finishers). One of the great things about this project is kids have a lot of fun and feel like they are getting away with something as they paint on the table, but truthfully it is one of my easiest clean ups. Every time I do this project, my tables are cleaner at the end of the project than they were before we started.

The next step for this project is cutting, glueing and weaving. To be honest, weaving has always been one of my least favorite processes because so frequently the end result is numerous copies with little to no variation. By using monotypes instead of regular colored construction paper for my paper strips,  students get papers that are richer and more varied. By cutting their papers into strips, and collaging those papers before weaving, students again are able to add a little bit more personal style to their work.