Residency / Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Tyler Green, High schoolers, 8 hours
On Tuesday, a group of homeschooled students and their parents came in for a drypoint lesson that I led. After getting a history of printmaking, Highpoint and seeing different examples of kinds of print making, it was my turn to take over the class.
I’ve taught this lesson a couple of times since beginning my internship last September, but spent the time in which they were walking around with Tyler to go over the demo and plan my image. In this technique, it’s important to show how to use the stylus to carve, how to gauge depth of carving, applying ink and how to remove it. Common issues students run into involve not carving deep enough, carving into the protective plastic sheet instead of the plate, or removing too much ink and gouging the ink out of their line work. We usually suggest basing a plate off a preliminary sketch, which when moving to the demo often involves showing how to use the light table for flipping text and numbers.
One thing I love about this demo is how the print varies so much from the sketch phase. In the demo I made a point of explaining that the sketch is just the guideline, and serves mostly as a jumping off point for the carving stage. I think the confidence to elaborate your final lines off a hazy idea of a sketch comes with practice, as it seems much easier for me to say “don’t put all your details in your sketch” than it is for ninth graders to trust their gut on their final work, especially with this process. In drypoint every line you make stays, which can be both liberating and intimidating. When carving with sharp metal into soft plastic, every line you make shows up. For a generation of upcoming artists reliant on CTRL+Z, it’s scary to let go of the impulse to create and recreate every line. For me it’s been extremely liberating to work in drypoint, as the art just is what it is. I think some students were able to lean into this and made really expressive work, while others spent a lot of time perfecting angles and straight lines. I think this kind of mindset, even if it’s not immediately adopted, is useful to have floating around in your head. (4 hours)
On Wednesday we had a group of seniors from MERC in to do emulsion screen printing. This specific group was in almost every Wednesday last semester and it was exciting to have them back into the classroom to see how their work had developed in the few months since I had seen them last. Screen printing is interesting because there are a lot of lulls in between demo times for students to fill in their images, to burn them onto their screens and then to set up their screens to print. It was a very chill class as these students came prepared with images and choose to come, meaning they spend their work time making as much work as they can. Much of my help during this class was checking drawings to make sure they were opaque enough to burn, helping plan out layers and picking and mixing colors while Tyler ran the screen burning and cleaning. This is a very self-driven process, and I found myself at times looking for things to do because the class was at a point where they mostly only came to me when they needed it, rather than needing help continuously.
Part of this, I think, is because we segment the class into parts of the process, which is scheduled out on the class whiteboard. The first part involves the inking materials and checking the opacity of drawings, and a demonstration of burning the screens. Once all students have their images transferred to screens at their own pace, they come together again as a class to see how screens are taped up and printed on. I’m wondering how much of the information retention comes from the division of demonstrations, and whether or not this scheduling can/should be used in other processes/age groups. Do some classes benefit from receiving all the information at once in order to see the end goal before starting? (4 hours)