The 5th/6th grade class has been carving stamps from soft cut blocks. They used acrylic paints to print their stamps on muslin cloth! The students read about the African Adinkra symbol stamps and created their own symbol.
African Adinkra Stamps
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Beautiful stamps! My fifth and sixth grade artists did a similar project last year as part of our Artist-in-Residence program. Here's a link to the post on my blog.
http://waitsfieldart.blogspot.com/search/label/West%20Africa
my other blog is http://faystonart.blogspot.com
I love your stamps. Since I work in a detention setting with girls not really allowed to have carving tools, I had to make my own adinkra symbol stamps for them to use to imprint clay beads. It was still fun. I'd like to find an easy way to try mock mud cloth using the stamps. Any ideas?
Thanks! Another option is to use the adhesive fun pieces and adhere cut shapes onto a wood block. Use acrylic paint with these. I'm not sure how they would work on cloth, but they work well on paper!
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I’m looking for an African themed art project for our annual girl scout day camp. This stamping technique looks cool… how were the stamps made? You mentioned soft cut blocks, but I don’t know what that is. Do you have any more specific instructions about that?
Here are the materials we used: http://www.enasco.com/product/9729988 It would cost a bit of money up front to get all of the lino-cutters but then after you have the tools, you could do the project over again and just buy the Soft-cut blocks (I recommend Nasco for the price). Lino-cutters are sharp and the kids could cut themselves so it would depend on the age. I don’t use the lino-cutters with lower than 5th grade, but I know other teachers that go down to 3rd grade. It’s what you’re comfortable with. This is another tutorial online. I also highly recommend Julie Fei-Fan Balzer’s book: Carve, Stamp, Play. I would definitely play around with at home a lot before trying it with kids. The kids do pick it up pretty quickly and printing with crayola or Mr. Sketch markers works pretty well.
Thanks so much for your reply, Marcia! I appreciate your help very much! I think this project might be out of our budget, but if I could find foam rubber stamps, we could probably use those… not as cool, because they wouldn’t be true Adinkra designs, but it would at least provide a teaching opportunity about the process.
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