Artline Monday - Easter holiday activity

The Easter break has started and any day now you will probably hear the dreaded words "I'm bored!" so today I have a fun and easy activity you can do with your children to keep them occupied for an hour or two.... potato printing Easter eggs!

Now, I thought every young child had done some potato printing in the early years of school but my daughter is nearly eight and she had no idea what I was on about when I mentioned this to her!  Maybe teachers don't have time to carve potatoes for a class of 30 children anymore?  Who knows!  But it is still a great activity to do at home.

Potato printing supplies

You will need:

• Lots of paper
• A potato or two
• Artline poster markers (the chalk markers work well too)
• A knife for carving
• Kitchen roll for blotting and cleaning

When you are selecting your potatoes try to find oval/egg shaped ones, you can cut and trim them into shape but it's easier to start with a basic egg shape.

Carve patterns

Hold your potato upright as if it was an egg in an egg cup and then slice it in half top to bottom.  You can either carve some Easter egg style patters into the potato flesh yourself or give them to your children and let them design their own with a child friendly knife.  We went with stripes and tried to make some flower shapes on our second potato but they ended up looking more like splodges!

Adding the colour

Once you have your carved potatoes, blot them with kitchen roll to pull out some of the moisture before adding the paint.

Then it is time for your children to get creative, pass them the poster markers and let them paint their designs onto the potatoes.  

Ready to print

When the potato is coloured in they can turn it over and print the image onto their paper. 

Printed Easter egg

The children can remove any excess paint from the potatoes with the kitchen roll and then paint them again in different colours and repeat the process over and over.

More printing

We made lots of different colour Easter eggs with our potato "stamps" and had a lot of fun!  You could cut out the prints and use them to make Easter cards or decorations or your children could draw in some more details and patterns using fineliners and pens once the paints have dried.  My daughter carried on printing without me and made sheets and sheets of eggs which she has stuck up on her bedroom wall to decorate the room for Easter.  

Our colourful Easter eggs

If you are looking for more arts and crafts to do over the holidays check out these previous Artline posts for more ideas.

Have a very happy Easter and thanks for stopping by!