Making the stamps

1. Cut the potatoes in half
2. Blot with kitchen towel or leave to dry out a bit (they hold the paint better that way)
3. If you’ve got some, make the print by pushing cookie cutters into the flat side of the potato and cutting around. It’s much easier than drawing on a design and cutting around it
4. Put the paint onto the print either by painting on using a paintbrush or just by sploding directly into the paint
5. Remove excess paint and away you go

Using the cookie cutter to make the design

Tips for potato printing

• Use non-toxic, water soluble paints
• Paper plates make good palettes and you can also get the excess paint off the potato print onto the plate (makes for a crisper print)
• Use kitchen towel to wipe clean the prints so that you can change colours
• Experiment on different types of paper

What they did

With help, they cut the potatoes in half and I did the fiddlier cutting out. They loved the process of colour-mixing as much as the printing itself. They asked me how to make their favourite colours (pink and purple) from the colours we had, so they were learning something too. They got the technique right quickly, dipping the stamps into the paint and then removing the excess on the paper plates and pressing down firmly on the paper. They also actually cleaned the stamps when they wanted to swap colours.

After making pictures with the potato prints, the activity morphed into hand printing!

More posts on activities:

Summer Activities for the Kids * Rainy Day Activities * Cheap Ways to Keep Kids Entertained * Marbling 

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I love how children learn through messy play. It helps them develop their creativity and imagination with a wide variety of objects, textures and materials. If I’m honest, I also love them doing the messiest of messy play somewhere other than our house.

Marble Painting

This particular week there was water play with various floats, coloured shaving foam piles to squidge hands into and make patterns with and a model farm complete with hay and construction toys. They played with it all. However, the thing that really captured them was the painting with marbles.

It was referred to as ‘marbling’. However, it wasn’t the marbling I’d done as a kid where you put inks onto water, which has washing up liquid in it, and then put a piece of paper on top to get a print. This was literally dunking and coating marbles in a choice of two paint colours, using a spoon to drop them into a tray lined with coloured sugar paper, and then rolling them around the tray. The girls did a picture each independently, a joint one where they took it in turns at doing a layer and a joint one where they both did everything at the same time. They were fascinated by how different each one looked. They were especially fascinated by how they got lots of different greens from just their blue and yellow paints.

A really simple, but great activity; and one that I actually will try at home.

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