Residency / Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Tyler Green, High schoolers, 7.5 hours
3.5 Hours / On Tuesday a group of Juniors from Chaska came in for a drypoint class, joined by some Seniors that had been in the Mola class that came for fun. Tyler led this class and I assisted. The class started at 9am which meant most of the students were pretty tired, resulting in a laid back atmosphere for the demo and work time. One issue that happens a lot with older students in doing drypoint is that they tend to over-wipe their plates when cleaning the ink off in an effort to leave just their line work, which results in gouging the ink from their lines. The nice thing about this process is that once the lines are etched it’s a relatively quick process to re-ink your plate, which means there can be many rounds to learn and try different wiping techniques. I think this process especially is good for practicing trial and error, since each print turns out slightly different each time.
4 hours / On Wednesday a group of students from HPSH HS came in to learn emulsion screen printing. Their teacher had prepared them all by providing resources so they could familiarize themselves with the entire process, which helped their confidence throughout the class between each stage. They came prepared with negatives for their screens, as well as fabric, paintings and drawings to print on top of. It was an engaging challenge figuring out which materials would work better to be printed on top of, as some paintings had many layers and the texture could have damaged the screens. In the classroom we always provide nice paper such as stonehenge and arches to print on, and it was really exciting to see how mixed media outside materials changed the mood and meaning of their prints.