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| Ernst Haeckel, 49th plate from Kunstformen der Natur, 1904 |
Mary's collagraph technique was one you could adapt for a very young class or a class of older children. We all began with a square-ish sized paper as our "plate" and were given scraps of paper, cardstock, Elmer's glue, scissors and a hole punch to build up our collagraph. For the youngest groups, Mary mentioned that she pre-cuts some of the shapes so that students will have an idea of the proportion in which they should be working.
With monsters as our theme, we cut and glued our scraps to make our plates. The next step was inking and printing which was done on prepared tables separate from the space where we made our collagraph plates. Mary had covered a couple tables completely with butcher paper, taping the paper to the tables to keep it in place. The prepared printing tables also had the registration all marked out for the plates and paper, so that your print would have an even border. This is a must-do step when working with children for two reasons; first, as long as they place their papers according to the registration markings, their print will be centered and have the proper border and secondly, students are then introduced to the principle in the printmaking process of "pulling a clean print."
When we inked our plates Mary showed us the proper way to charge our brayers, not rolling all over back and forth with the ink on the piece of plexi-glass, but rolling in one direction only and lifting the brayer. The whole length of the brayer should be inked. We inked our plates, placed them on the registration marks, placed the paper on top and rubbed the back of the paper working in small circles covering the entire surface of the paper. We then carefully pulled the paper away from the plate and, voila--we had our print! To back track a bit, we used one color to ink our plates, because we were printing on black paper, after we had our plates inked up with our chosen color, most of us inked our plates very lightly with white ink. The purpose of this was to really make our printed images pop.
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| My Monster Collagraph |
For last phase of the demonstration Mary showed us how to make a print with multiple colors of ink. In order to make your background a different color, you need to cut out your image from the plate. Then we rolled out one color of ink on a piece of plexi-glass placed over the registration marked on the table and inked a square that was the same size as our original plate. In another color we inked the cut out collagraph and placed it on top of the inked square. Following the same steps from that point as our first print, our result was then a two color print. Our last print was a multiple color, collaborative monster on larger paper. We cut our collagraphs even more and combined our different parts to make one monster.
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| Caitlin's 2-Color Monster Collagraph |
One tip Mary mentioned was that when she is doing printmaking with very young children, kindergarten age, she uses a system where children who are inking and printing must be wearing a printing necklace. There are limited necklaces so only a set number of students can be printing at once. The rest of the class should be drawing or working on a different project. Once the child has printed, they pass the necklace onto another child. I thought this was a great way to keep control over the process and the materials. I have taught printmaking projects to young children in the past, and enjoy the process, however my set-up and instruction were not organized in the same way as Mary had demonstrated. A lot was lacking from my instruction and I will definitely employ the techniques I learned in this class to future classes I will be teaching.
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| Romina's 2-Color Monster Collagraph |
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