The tools exist today to make “straight” printmaking—an excellent rendering of tones and values—a fairly straightforward affair. Knowing how to use those tools is important as they help create a foundation for the next steps in printmaking—an expressive and individualistic rendition of perception, emotion and visual aesthetics. That mix is different for each printmaker; how it translates into prints helps define style and can form the basis for a body of work. How each printmaker creates a strategy for using these tools for those ends is the goal of this class.
The class concentrates on monochrome printmaking, which includes many styles and approaches, from expressionistic to naturalistic to highly graphic, and includes the use of numerous plug-ins for creating foundation images, using duotone and “toned” looks, creating low-sat and high and low key, as well as infrared and threshold interpretations. The tools are many and varied, but what is most important in this class is defining a look and emotional feel to your prints that makes the effort worthwhile, an effort that makes you look at them in silence and know that you have expressed something from within yourself.