press play print

This has been a dynamic year, and, almost by accident, I fell into teaching 2d & digital arts to grades 7 - 12 at a private girls' school in Honolulu. The kids here are at a very different place in their artistic development than where I remember being at their age, growing up in the great northwest of the U.S. Mainland. These kids are lost in their electronics at every chance they get. While they seem to have a natural sense of design, due in part to the bombardment of imagery over ever expanding media, the kinetic, hand-eye coordination required for more traditional arts is not what I remember it being fifteen years ago. With the middle school students, the patience required to develop observational, rendering skills and work with lengthy artistic processes is all but absent.

For this audience, I needed to develop a quick-but-simple method for introducing printmaking that set the students up for success but also taught basic concepts & techniques involved in printmaking.

We combined lessons on the use of symmetry, balance, & visual pun with suicide reduction relief printmaking. The assignment involved using visual pun to design a new face card character for a scaled-up playing card (e.g. King Kong, Jack-in-the-box, King Tut, Dairy Queen, etc.) Using poster board as our printing matrix allowed students to print from the back of their poster board printing plates, leaving their drawings untouched & available as cutting guides, and putting off the need to deal with the image reversal that normally happens with relief printing.

Kids first cut out areas they wished to stay white, proofed their lightest layer, and printed it twice on their card (one on both the top and bottom halves of their card, with their characters' heads toward the card extremities). Next, they used their drawing as a cutting guide to cut out areas they wanted to stay that initially printed color, and they hand registered and printed their next darkest color over the first. In most cases, we used traditional card colors (primaries & black). If students had complex line work, I encouraged them to sharpie these on after the fact. In this way, students learned the techniques of drawing, cutting, proofing, hand-registering, & creating multiples (two of the same print within one artwork) & variations (introduced through proofs vs. final print & finishing drawn elements on their printed card) associated with reduction relief printmaking.

Examples shown here: Sushi King (teacher's print - name of a local restaurant chain) & student work: Dairy Queen, & King Tut).