While working on my BFA I took “Digital Printmaking” here at Mason as an elective. For the most part, all we did in that class was create images in Photoshop, print them out, and transfer them to paper using a screen printer. And thus concludes the entirety of my experience with “printmaking” to date.
Experimenting with printmaking in AVT 667 was eye opening, in that it made clear just how little I know about the process. I had a vague awareness of some of the terms brought up during the pre-assessment, such as intaglio, relief, and monoprint, but even those definitions I didn’t feel confident in. For my own future reference, this is a handy resource for tools, techniques and terms commonly used in printmaking: https://www.ipcny.org/glossary
When faced with the array of supplies for this unit, what became immediately obvious to me is how unintuitive they are. With a paintbrush, a pencil, or a lump of clay I believe even a complete novice can grasp how they work just by looking at them. In printmaking, objects such as a brayer or a chisel are similarly self-explanatory. But shaving cream, a box of toothpicks and some food coloring? A gel pad and a pile of leaves and feathers? I’d be more likely to stumble my way through disarming a bomb than figuring out how these things work together. For this reason, my first, unguided attempts to produce prints with them were, to put it mildly, unproductive. The only thing I’d successfully made, was a mess.
More future reference:
Gelli Pad Printing
Shaving Cream Prints
I tried carving into a Plexiglas panel with a chisel, as again, that at least seemed pretty straightforward. The carving part of the process went smoothly, but using that to create an actual print was another failure. I thought I knew how it worked and quickly discovered how incorrect of an assumption that was. Rolling paint onto the panel and pressing it to paper produced a vague, ghostly smudge of nothing. (The Plexiglas plate is on the right, print attempt at left.)
In summation, printmaking is not a unit I would feel comfortable teaching without significant independent investigation first. Any demonstration I attempted to give or question I tried to answer would be done with a complete lack of confidence. As I discovered firsthand, printmaking isn’t something a student can just pick up and figure out, it requires guided instruction. Until I can get a firmer grasp on how these things work, any guidance I gave would be straight off of a cliff and into the abyss.
Below, a gallery of broken dreams.
