How to Create Printed Heart Cards With Tiles

We enjoy exploring art, design and crafting together.  Often we may follow certain patterns or designs, other times my daughter will use the skills she has to explore a medium or idea on her own.  I was wanting to introduce printing as an art and design technique to her, expanding on some simple ideas that we have explored in the past.

I wanted her to look at creating a greetings card from a printed design using tiles.  This simple printing technique requires taking care as you apply the paper so that you fully transfer the design onto it without smudging.  We explored multiple prints from one paint application and discussed why the last image was fainter than the first.

Materials Needed

ceramic or foam floor tiles      paint      brush      paper      card     permanent marker

How to Make It

First, we wiped down the tiles and mixed the paint.  Next, she used the permanent marker to draw her heart design onto the tile and then we waited for it to dry.  We applied the paint to her design before carefully placing the paper on top.  She placed more sheets, one after the other, onto the tile to make a print and noted how the print became fainter. We also realised that she had to press down harder to get the paint to stick to the paper.

We added the paint to the outside of her heart design and repeated the process.  Here she noted that there was still a heart in the design even though she had not painted a heart!  We then talked about positive and negative prints and looked at some similar effects used in the past.  We also discovered that the print on paper was a mirror image of the design she had painted onto the tile.

Finally, we cut out some of the hearts and stuck them onto some folded card to make a lovely greeting card ideal for showing someone that you love them!

We enjoyed this so much that we hope to explore even more printing and painting techniques over the next few months.

Early Elementary Bloggers – Hearts

We join the rest of the Early Elementary Bloggers sharing Valentines Day Learning Activities

Low Prep Rounding Activity by Life Over C’s

Conversation Heart More or Less Activity by Raising Little Superheroes

{FREE} Valentine’s Math Game for PreK to 4th Grade from Preschool Powol Packets

Needle Felted Heart by Rainy Day Mum

Broken Hearts Compound Words from School Time Snippets

Spelling with Hearts sort the right and wrong spellings from In The Playroom

Kid’s Engineering: Valentines Heart Bombs from Thriving STEM