Do you like owls?

Let’s make vegetable printing more unique!

My daughters and I worked on another project for 4H to enter in the fair. The category is Fruit or Vegetable Prints and we wanted to kick it up a notch and make this kind of printing “owl-some”!

First I cut notches out of potato halves in order to make a simple owl body shape – really simple and I just did the cutting to make sure the kids didn’t cut themselves.

Then I told the girls that I was going to divide my 8″ x 10″ paper into sections, but they could do what they wanted for their prints.  I used a ruler and divided mine into 12 equal sections, with a few small sections on the bottom of the page.  My youngest divided hers into 6 equal sections and my oldest divided hers into a random triangular pattern.

Now the fun part printing, you can either dip the potato into a pile of paint (little too messy for us) or you can paint onto the potato and then print.  We used acrylic paint, but tempera will work great too!

We found that you have to press the potato onto the paper and then use a rocking motion to make sure that the potato prints mostly everywhere.  Unless you are a master at cutting a straight potato – which I obviously was not!

We didn’t mind if a few spots didn’t print perfectly, that gave each of our owls character!

My daughter began by adding eyes to her owls after they dried and I started on feet first.  My daughter made her eyes using a silver and a black sharpie and I used a thin sharpie for my cute owl feet!

I used emoji inspiration as a starting point for all of my different owls.  Anything black I did with a thin sharpie and the rest was acrylic paint.

My oldest’s Owl Print

My youngest’s Owl Print

Have a great time crafting with your children!