Project #5: Prints

The project I picked for my second and final freestyle piece of art were my prints. This project was probably in my top two. It required a lot of different skills and I enjoyed learning all of them. The panda on the right was made in a different process then the leaf print on the left. For the panda, we first had to pick an animal. I have always loved pandas, so I picked that as my subject. Then drew the animal onto thin paper, which we then retraced with sharpie onto a small square of linoleum. Linoleum is usually what the tiles on the classroom are made out of. It consists of renewable materials such as wood flour, ground cork dust, solidified linseed oil, and mineral fillers like calcium carbonate. We used this because it is a material that can easily be cut. We used small knives and different cutters in order to create different lines or textures. Once we traced the animal onto the linoleum with sharpie we cut the lines with the small knives and began to add small details. While cutting we used a tool called a "stop." The name explains what it is; it is a tool that you hold against the table that you hold to the linoleum up against to prevent it from sliding. Although the knives were small we still had to be careful. Ms.Brokke always reminded us to cut in the direction away from us, and move the piece of linoleum when it was difficult to cut the other way. After all the cutting was done, we selected multiple colors of ink, and you could combine colors as well. You would put a little bit of ink on the stop and use the roller to get a consistent amount of ink on all sides of the roller. The next step was to roll the ink on the linoleum. You would keep rolling until the whole square was covered and you would then put piece of paper on top of the linoleum, press down on it evenly all over and wait a little bit. After that you would peel back a corner to see if it was ready, and if it was, you would peel the paper off and then a print would be made. The leaf print was a side project after the animal print, but I thought it was a really cool project because of the way it was made so simply. For this small project, you take masking tape and you make a rectangle/square on the bare table. You then take any colored ink and roll it onto the table. After that you can make any design. I took an unsharpened pencil and drew a few leaves. I used two different color inks, blue and pink to create somewhat of a purple. This was one of the projects that I learned the most from because there were so many steps to this.