RESIDENCY- CHILDREN’S RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT CENTER WITH CARMEN ELATE- 4 HOURS
This week was my lesson week which is obviously very exciting. I was really ready to teach my lesson because my kids are really encouraging and curious about what I had coming up. On Monday, I came in early so that I could set up all of my materials for class that day. I gave a quick explanation and then my students went right to it. I will post some picture examples of the crafting of the plates from the first day.
Students were very excited by the variety of materials which I wasn’t surprised by since I brought some things with very weird textures. The kids were especially interested in the plaster.
On Thursday, I did the main part of my lesson which was the actual printing demo. I am also going to repeat this demo on Monday because the amount of people in one classroom at one time fluctuates with this group and some student just were not ready to print. The printing process was a lot of trial and error but I tried to be really reassuring about this because even for a person who prints all the time, it sometimes is very difficult to get a good result. I was able to get most of my students to do at least 3 prints which may have been annoying to them at first but for most of them, by the third print, the image turned out really well. I don’t have many images of the final prints yet but I will take some more pictures when I head back in on Monday.
Looking back on my lesson, I think I would have made the content more interesting. I am finding that a lot of my students want to make second prints that don’t have to do with my original concept and a lot of those prints are starting to be character based. Another thing that I forgot to tell my students is that text will show up backwards and most didn’t seem too bothered by it but it still is something that I would for sure want to remember for next time.
This is a student using a barren to press their plate onto their paper.
Overall, it went really well. I was really excited to have a student end up really interested in printmaking after the lesson was over. He told me that he had always wanted to do this and that with in itself was enough for me to know that this lesson was worthwhile.