Potatoes are our ingredient of the season. You can find our full archive of potato posts here.

Have you ever used potato stamps before? The idea is super simple : carve a shape into the smooth side of a cut potato, dip it in paint, and print it on paper!

Today we created a simple project inspired by Swimmy, a book written and illustrated by Leo Lionni.

Swimmy & Lionni

Lionni is said to be the first children’s illustrator to use collage as his main medium. In this book, the illustrations are printed. And, on many of the pages, you can see that the same stamps are used over and over again, as in these examples with the fish.

Swimmy’s story is relatively simple. He stands out from his school of fish, but sadly one day they are all eaten (except him!). He ventures out into the ocean and sees many wonderful sites. Eventually he finds another school of fish, and this time he teaches his new family a way to work together and protect themselves.

If you’ve never read it before, we’ve included a video of the story above. But really, there’s nothing better than reading aloud to your kids, and it’s nice to have the book on hand to discuss the artwork and how to use a couple of stamps to make a complex image, so we suggest picking up a copy from your favorite bookstore or the library.

You’ll see that we focused our work on the pages of Swimmy and his school of fish. But there are many beautiful illustrations in the book that you could recreate (my other favorite is the seaweed printed using doilies).

Potato Stamp 411

I prefer keeping projects simple, because I often believe that that helps little kiddos create beautiful artwork without too many complications, confusing steps, or accidental blunders (like mixing all of the colors and just getting brown!). In an effort to keep this project simple, we used just two stamps and two colors, EXCEPT at the last moment when we added a black Swimmy to our pieces.

• start the project by cutting out two stamps : a fish and a wave. This obviously requires an adult to use the knife.
• set up two printing areas : I like to use a clean sponge with paint poured on top. You can pat the stamp onto the paint area to get a thin and even layer of paint on the stamp.
• start stamping!

The nice thing about using Swimmy as inspiration for these projects is that the kiddos can stamp a school of fish going in any direction. As you can see in the original work, fish are swimming up, down, and all around.

And as you can see from our pile of work above, stamping takes a bit of practice. At first the boys wanted to stamp and slide the potatoes. Similar to how they would slide a paintbrush across the paper. It took a little bit of help and some practice to get them comfortable with stamping and lifting the stamp straight up.

This is a great project for making a book “come alive” for the kids. Imitating art found in books is a great way to expose kids to different techniques. It encourages them to start questioning how different pieces of art are made and gives them the tools to start making their own original pieces!