A Fancy Skull Craft for Day of the Dead

As you may know, Day of the Dead- Día de los Muertos- is a holiday celebrated in Mexico, some other countries in Latin America, a few countries in Europe, and the Philippines. In Mexico, skeletons are decorated, dressed-up, and given personalities and activities. Today we’ll make etchings and then prints of skulls and finally decorate them with glitter, sequins, and puffy paint!

Begin by gathering your materials:
*styrofoam (I saved and washed mine from the supermarket)
*pencils
*printing ink
*brayer (I bought mine at a craft store- I wonder if you could use a mini-paint roller?)
*sequins, glitter, little flowers, puffy paint, etc.

I had my kids practice drawing skulls on papers first. After we drew on paper, we used pencils to draw (press hard!) on the styrofoam.

Once we had our skulls (some scary and some smiley and flowery) we squeezed a bit of the printing ink (a bit thinner than paint) onto a paper plate. Rolling the brayer in the ink until it was evenly coated, we then rolled it over our “etching.”

The next step is where the magic happens!:) Pressing our designs onto the paper, and carefully lifting to reveal our designs was the most exciting part of the process!

How sweet is my daughter’s surprise and excitement? I love it:).

We let the ink dry for a bit and gathered our other art supplies.

The kids then decorated their skulls with lots of colors! Sugar skulls are typically decorated with sequins and thick frosting (we used puffy paint), and we also used little lace flowers and glitter- because as my daughter says, “glitter makes everything better.”