RESIDENCY- CHILDREN’S RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER WITH CARMEN ELATE- 1.5 HOURS
Monday once again got cancelled because the residential treatment center is a Minneapolis public school and they were closed for President’s day. Even though I didn’t go in, I did get the chance to speak with Lynda about the lesson that I will teach coming up soon!
I plan to teach on the 4th, 7th, and 11th of March since my lesson will be 3 parts. The class times are short and taking on printmaking means that there will be a bit of an extra mess so I do need to spread this out over a considerable amount of time. I am gonna teach my students about collagraph printing!
Collagraph printing is not something that I have ever even tried to do in my life but I am going to learn. I have been really into printmaking as a method of illustration and I wanted to bring that to the classroom without using fancy presses or carving tools. I want this to introduce printmaking to students but also give them options that don’t involve lots of extra equipment. Collagraph printing is where you take a piece of cardboard (or any form of hard plate) and glue down objects to it to make a 3d drawing. That then becomes the plate that you roll ink on and print with. This seemed like a really fun, low pressure method of printing to me so I am gonna use it to teach about printmaking and composition as a whole!
I currently don’t have examples or pictures that I can use to make what I am speaking of easily understandable but I plan to recruit a few of my friends to make some examples with me. It feels crazy that my lesson is coming up so soon, so I really have to pull things together kind of quickly to make things work.
On Thursday, I was able to make it to the center and they had a new assignment lined up. The class is still doing photography but now they have moved on to a bit of abstract photography. Next Thursday the students are going on a trip to the Minnesota Public Library downtown to take some photos. Here is the assignment!
The day there was pretty laid back, some students were really excited about the photography but many of them were drawing or painting and I sat with them and did the same. Carmen gave me a sketchbook to keep there so that I could draw with the students and that was really fun. I presume that this upcoming week will be pretty similar.