Low-Tech Printmaking

"Drawings are almost always the product of adventure and struggle, and metaphorically speaking, every drawing has a potential dragon that needs slaying on the way to freeing the princess, or securing the pot of gold. It's the fisherman's struggle to lure and land the fish, and our own search for the Holy Grail."

"For the purposes of drawing, we should always look at objects as if they were new and unfamiliar - in a state of enquiry - and without the labels: wisdom is the forgetting of all you know. (Arthur Schopenhauer)"

From: 'Drawing Projects/ an exploration of the language of drawing' by Mick Maslen and Jack Southern'

In this workshop we explored simple and inexpensive printmaking techniques, such as monoprinting, potato printing and stencilling. Some ideas for this were taken out of "Print Workshop - Hand-Printing Techniques + Truly Original Projects" by Christine Schmidt - a very inspiring book for anyone interested in affordable printmaking workshop techniques.

For monoprinting we used acetate sheets, a few brayers, block printing ink and newsprint. We started drawing from observation and slowly built up a composition by adding details with various techniques and tools. There are no rules and limits and it was nice to see how quickly people came up with own ideas and variations of techniques.

For the potato prints we used common potatoes, halved them and cut into them with lino cutters. Some of us then went on to cut stencils into newsprint to layer more blocks of colour over the finer detail of the monoprints.

Ken's monoprint

Katherine's monoprint

    Nancy's layered monoprint