Grade 10 Intro to Relief Printmaking

Most of my Grade 10 students have never done printmaking before, let alone had an actual Art class before joining our school. (Apparently this is the norm in public schools here). So, there has been a lot of work to do in terms of basic skills and knowledge building. We spent the better part  of the first semester working on goals and establishing basic Art knowledge. Students learned realistic drawing and life drawing techniques, a bit of Art History, created process journals and made their own small notebooks for daily/weekly sketching.

The last small project we worked on last semester was Beginning Relief Printmaking, since we just got our brand new etching press!  We looked at the history of Printmaking, and made the connection that wood cutting basically originated in China, which was super cool for the students to learn. We looked at different types of Printmaking, including Etching, Monotype, Relief, Lithography and Screen printing. Students came up with a small logo that had some sort of personal meaning, and then we used small square pieces of rubber to learn carving. I did a demo, and then the rest was basically up to them.

Questions of Inquiry ranged from:
Is wet or dry paper best for printing?
How thick does the ink need to be?
How does color choice inform the artwork?
Why did I create this particular image?

In the end, we did a small critique and talked about all of the challenges and victories of the first print "series".  I can't wait to delve much deeper into different forms of Printmaking and see what they come up with!