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These Kaleidoscope Mandala Collagraphs will blow your mind! Created by our teens and tweens during art summer camp – their talent never ceases to amaze us!

Inspired by beautiful radial designs of mandalas, students created their printing plates using a thin foam + glue sticks applied to a heavy weight 6 ply mat board. Honestly I’m not sure why we used the foam, it didn’t work that well as it didn’t adhere very well with the glue stick — I would suggest just cutting the pieces out of either mat board, or – the easiest process ever – just use self adhesive foam. Then you don’t even need a glue stick. Just so you can make sense of these photos though, we used the thin white foam + a glue stick, but to secure the printing plate before printing, we had to cover it with a thick coat of Mod Podge. Otherwise all the little pieces would have been flying off during the printmaking process.

As we always do, we printed them using Blick’s Water Soluble printmaking ink, applied with a brayer. We only use this ink when printmaking because it is thick bodied, and slow drying. This is important when you are printing on a large scale and to get an even print. You could attempt to get a decent print with acrylic and it seems like it would work great – but the consistency of acrylic is all wrong for printmaking – and it dries way too quick! Don’t even waste your time 🙂

And speaking of the printmaking process… looks like we didn’t even get any photos of the that, or their actual prints! We were distracted by the idea to color these printing plates with chalk pastel! The dried printmaking ink on the printing plates gave them a really great “toothy” texture that really grabbed ahold of the chalk pigment. These were seriously just pure eye candy!