Four days of workshops? Yes why not!
Friday and Sunday was a two day workshop on multicolured prints including reduction and multiblock.
Friday tea time, Children's Session
Saturday was a single colour session
Monday mixed media printing with Sarah.
I had a great weekend. It was so nice to be able to set up and leave everything in situ for the duration. I'm going to add lots of pics and a materials list for each workshop but much has been covered before in previous blogs Absolute Basics & Multicoloured Linocuts All ink is Caligo Safewash.
Children's session.
This was a session for parents to support their children with some printmaking.
We used Japanese wood cut tools, easy cut 'lino' and the bench hook and some safety hand guards. Papers were book papers, brown paper and Hosho. My only concerns with the 'safety' hand guard is that you are learning to cut towards the hand which is holding the guard. Ideally I prefer people to learn correctlay from scratch; the holding hand away from the cutting direction. However, small children can find this quite challenging.
Multicoloured session
Tools as before,
Ternes Burton pins and tabs
Papers, Hosho, Masa, Zerkall, Canaletto, brown and book papers.
This couple of days was about honing registration and mixing inks to acheive the required results.
This is a handy guide for mixing the Process colours
A couple of things which I use a lot in various ways are extender and white ink. Extender will increase transparancy and white will make colours opaque. The photo below shows Process Blue with a lot of Extender, it's just like clear ink.
Both are very useful when creating multicoloured prints.
We used several methods of registration, here are some simple registration methods from Kerry Day I find Ternes Burton pins and tabs work really well and use these when making my reduction prints.
Saturday single colour session
We used the same papers as the workshop above.
Sarah Jane Keyworth's Monday session
Sarah is a local artist who runs Saturday morning sessions in her lovely old forge. You can find out more here
Sarah came with a plethora of natural materials that she had pressed. She described how she had to slide seaweed onto blotting paper to stop it curling. This was a busy session as we had eight people.
Please contact Sarah for more information on this type of printing which uses heavier weight papers and a press.
