Styrofoam Rainbow Prints

We've been busy creating with rainbows lately! C loves drawing rainbows and knows the color order of them well too.  Over this past week we decided to create Styrofoam Rainbow Prints.  Pretty Fun and colorful. Keep reading to find out how we made them.

To create Styrofoam Rainbow Prints you'll need:

styrofoam trays

a dull pencil

tempera or acrylic paint in rainbow colors

paint brushes (foam brushes would work great for this!)

paper

First,  cut the edges of your styrofoam tray off to form a flat piece of foam.  Then, you can either pre-plan your drawing and transfer to the foam or draw directly on the styrofoam with a dull pencil.  Press into the foam with the pencil to make an impression, but not so hard that you create a hole in the foam.  My daughter created these drawings pretty quickly....your child may spend more time.  (Remember words will be backwards.)

Then, I put out red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet tempera paint with a brush for each color. You could use acrylic paint too.  C then brushed a strip of each rainbow color across her foam drawing.
Try to use a thinner layer of paint or the print will not come out very well. ***A foam paint brush would work really well for this!

Here is how the paint should look.  C's first print did not come out because she had too much paint, but the great thing about printmaking is that you can create multiple pictures if you mess up.

After you have the paint on the styrofoam tray,  take a piece of paper and put it over the painted tray.  Then take your hands and rub over the paper with some pressure so the paint will transfer to create a print.

As you can see, we created many many styrofoam Rainbow Prints. This is the beauty of printmaking and  it is very addicting. I think they are just LOVELY!

What Rainbow projects have you been working on with children?

***Check out our Shamrock Apple Prints and Glue Prints for some more Printmaking Fun.