Looking for a cross-curricular music and art project that incorporates still-life drawing and printmaking?  This is your project!

I set up 4 drawing stations with an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, and two different stand-up drums.  We also borrowed several large posters from the music teacher for the harps and violas that we didn’t have access to.  The students folded their manilla drawing papers into 4 sections and got to choose which four instruments they drew.

Then they picked their favorite drawing, taped the drawing onto a foam rectangle, and re-traced their drawn lines with a sharp-pointed wooden tracing tool.  Once they had made the indentations of their drawings into their foam rectangles, we inked up their drawings and printed them.  I was lucky enough to have a sweet friend visit her home state of Vermont and bring back several free Vermont maps that we cut and printed onto.  We also printed onto colored tissue paper.

For printing inks, I alternated black ink and red ink.  Both great choices!

This project takes about 6 weeks from start to finish, but it’s worth it.  It’s one of my all-time favorite art projects.  Everyone gets an amazing print when they’re done!  Next time I teach it, I’m going to actively search for some fantastic parent volunteers for the printing stage of this project.  It doesn’t seem fair to spend over a month creating them but then only pulling one or two prints because of class size.