Another Workshop

Yes, I've been at it again. I signed up for an Akua printmaking workshop which was held this weekend. Why?  I'm not really sure except I like to take classes.  Also, when I did printmaking in college, we really only did etching and aquatint.  That wasn't a very exciting process for me.  I wish we had gone through many different printmaking techniques so we could discover the ones we liked the best.

The workshop was taught by Melanie Yazzie, an artist and professor from Colorado. For half the day on Friday, she demonstrated different monotype techniques using the Akua inks, which are soy based.

As with the encaustic, there are so many avenues to explore with this medium. Melanie showed us a three color reduction method.  Below she is working on the second color on the plate.  The yellow prints were the first pulls; the fully inked plate and then the second "ghost" print.


After running the red through the press, then she did a layer of blue on the plate and came up with the two prints below.  They are so different because some of the pulls were the "ghost" layer of ink.


She also showed us how to use stencils.  That was very exciting to me because there were so many different ways to get prints from them and you could do them fairly quickly.  Melanie shows one of her monotype stencil demos below.  She showed us several other techniques as well.


Today we actually started to work on our own prints.  Melanie had to fly home Friday afternoon, so she was not there.  The workshop was hosted by Amy Nack of Wingtip Press.  Below is the space in which four of us worked.  Three other people were in another room.


Names of people above from left to right: Terry, Lisa Cheney-Jorgensen, Molly and Deb or Debra.
 

 The whole group: Terry is knealing, Lisa C., Amy, Melanie, Molly, Karen, Linda and Deb.

I'll show you some of my prints tomorrow.