A fun and simple way to explore printmaking projects in your classroom
I love all the different bugs, animals, people, and other designs you can make through the use of fingerprint art and recently, I found a way to make the fingerprint painting process a better experience for the children by making my own DIY fingerprint paint pads…
I have tried different kinds of painting pads for printing and even washable ink stamp pads for printing but trying to add just the right amount of paint to my paint pads or keeping the colors of my ink stamp pads from getting all mixed up and mucky has been a challenge…
So, I decided to try a new type of paint pad. I picked up a few shammies from the Dollar Tree…
The How-To
Cut a shammy into smaller pieces then get them wet and wring out the water. Next, add a small puddle of paint on top of each piece of shammy and rub it in with your finger or a paint brush. I just used my finger…
And now you have a paint pad that absorbs the paint just a bit but keeps the paint usable for printmaking. If the paint on the shammy starts to get used up, just add a little more and rub it in again. We didn’t have to add more paint, but it would have been no problem to do so…
Fingerprint Art Ideas
We used our paint pads for two different projects in preparation for our Mother’s Day Tea party including making place cards for our tables…
And for decorating our gift bags for our parent gifts. Because the paint doesn’t go onto the paper too thick, the children could go ahead and add their legs or faces or other features to their fingerprints without having to wait for the paint to dry…
Reusing the Paint Pads
When finished, the pieces of shammy can be rinsed out and set aside to dry for use again or just tossed in the trash if you are in a place where you need a quick paint pad but don’t want to save them when you are done. And mixing the colors on the shammy paint pads can be part of the fun without having to worry about having mucky colors or ruining your expensive ink stamp pads…
Oh, and we supplied small pieces of damp paper towels for those who preferred to wipe their fingers off between colors but not every child was all that worried about it…
By the way, I have only tried this with the Shammy from the Dollar Tree so it may work differently depending on the kind of shammy you would buy and I haven’t tried adding paint to a dry shammy – only a wet one.
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