Monoprint, Woodcut, & Linoleum at SVA

This summer I was fortunate to attend the last Monoprint, Woodcut, and Linoleum class taught at the School of Visual Arts by longtime faculty member, Dominick Rapone. My only regret is not taking his class years ago and the many others he taught including Silkscreening and Engraving.

By taking this class, I gained access to the entire print lab which has every sort of print-making tool imaginable, I only got a chance to scratch the surface. There's a photography lab and a computer lab with banks of Macs and large-scale printers and scanners. I immediately fell in love with cutting wood and linoleum and I found that holding a piece of printed paper was a feeling I never want to stop having.

Souixie, above, is 12" x 16". I have a few prints, please let me know if you're interested [email me].

This is a quick little 5" x 7" linoleum print of my cat Pippi. Turns out linoleum is REALLY fun to work with! I've got some really interesting things coming up in this medium.

Here are the front (above) and back (below) of a folded Thank You card I did for the reduction print project. With reduction prints, all the colors are printed from the same woodblock (in this case I chose yellow, orange, and black as my ink colors on white paper). The lightest color gets printed first, then the next darkest, then next darkest.

In this case, I carved out what will remain white first and printed the yellow. I removed more wood and what remains is printed orange. The last of the design is carved out and printed black.

The trick with this type of printing is the registration or exact placement each time the block is printed. I just eyeballed it to varying degrees of misalignment because there were tons of people printing that day.

We wrapped up the semester with calegraph prints which I can't wait to do more of. Essentially you're making an imprint of a low-relief 'original', in this case an acrylic painting.

The prints above and below are from a group called Silver Spaceman.

Silver Spaceman was printed with black ink on white paper and silver ink on black and dark brown paper. I printed dozens from the same original that are all completely different. (So much for an edition, Dominick:)