Weekend Fun: Potato Print Eggs
Spring is full of flowers, eggs, and new life – and it arrives during Youth Art Month! Celebrate art (and spring) with paper and paint and plenty of good books that feature art and artists.
There are lots of interesting projects to try in Art Lab for Kids by Susan Schwake. To develop an appreciation for different styles of art, try the picture book Seen Art? by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, which brings you through the Museum of Modern Art at breakneck speed (but you can turn the pages more slowly if you want to explore). The Katie series by James Mayhew features a girl who goes in and out of the framed paintings hanging in a museum: Katie Meets the Impressionists, Katie’s Sunday Afternoon, and Katie and the Mona Lisa.
Make your own art by carving and printing with a potato! This works well with potatoes that are getting too wrinkly to eat, or you may use new potatoes (but you won’t be able to cook and eat them after they are used for painting).
What you need:
- One or more potatoes
- Plastic knife
- Pencil
- Take-out container lid
- Paper towels
- Acrylic paint
- Paper
- Scissors
What you do:
- Cut a potato in half with the plastic knife.
- Draw a design on it with the pencil, letting the pencil actually cut into the potato. TIP: You can draw the design on paper first and cut it out, then use it to trace on the potato.
- Push away the parts of the potato that are outside the design. TIP: The pencil can do most of this, but the plastic knife can help with any harder chunks of potato.
- Repeat with a different design on the other half of the potato.
- Draw an egg shape (or any other shape) on a piece of paper and cut it out.
- Put the paper towel in the take-out container top and put a dab of acrylic paint on it.
- Dip the potato design in the paint and then stamp or spread it over the paper towel to remove some of the paint.
- Stamp the design onto the egg shape.
- Repeat steps 6 – 8 as often as you wish, using and mixing different colors to make new ones.
