Wintersemester 2020/2021, BA/MA Visuelle Kommunikation , Malerei , Bildhauerei Druckgrafik Lithografie , Druckgrafik Tiefdruck

Workshop „Digital pathways into traditional print mediums“

Workshop Section One: Post-Digital Printmaking: Digital pathways into traditional print mediums

 

Workshop Section Two: Exploring crossovers between digital media and traditional etching and lithography.

 

Workshop Section One: Post-Digital Printmaking: Digital pathways into traditional print mediums

 

‘Post-Digital Printmaking’ refers to a set of artistic practices where digital platforms and ‘traditional’ analogue print processes are fully integrated. In this workshop students will take a drawing, painting, print, or collage of their own for import into the print ‘matrix.’ Here one can move back and forth between hand and computer-aided operations. The initial image(s) a student chooses is not intended to be copied; rather as a starting point to generate multiple different print possibilities. In Photoshop there are numerous simple and complicated tools where one can plan an image for output into ‘traditional’ print medias—i.e. silkscreen, etching, lithograph, relief, and inkjet. Among the digital tools explored are: bitmaps, selection tools, thresholds, levels/curves, posterize filter, cutout filter, cmyk channels, rgb channels, split multichannel, duotone and tritone, index color, custom brushes, and of course, layers. And, there are more! Photoshop aides in planning sophisticated color and greyscale pallets—hue, saturation, density, transparency, pantone color dropper. We will go over the theoretical and practical similarities and differences between: a ‘standardized’ printmaker’s cmyk color space; photographer’s ryb/rgb color space; a digital subtractive color space; and a painters more‘subjective’ color pallet. Along the way we will discuss numerous ways to output an image into a print. At the first level, silkscreen and the photo-emulsion stencil is often the easiest print medium to ‘see’ for digitally savvy artists. However, there are numerous ways to import digital planning into etching, woodblock, and lithography. We will explore these in Section Two of the workshop.

 

Workshop Section Two: Exploring crossovers between digital media and traditional etching and lithography

 

Our new digital toolkit provides numerous opportunities for reinventing traditional print techniques. Some have been explored ‘recipes’ for new processes are known. But there are many more possibilities that have not yet been investigated. We will work in this section to invent a new process bringing together digital planning with photo etching processes. By the end of this workshop, we will have a new recipe to add to the printmakers toolkit. The typical way to move a digital image into printmaking is via transparencies/films—photoemulsion stencils in silkscreen, photolithographic plates, or photoetching plates. However, with all of these processes there are major limitations. We will focus on etchings. With lithographs and etchings the chief obstacle is that reworking the plate after the 'etch' is very difficult. I consider a photopolymer etching plates a ‘dead end’ in that after it is exposed, there is very little the artist can do to rework the plate. There is an older photo-plate process called photogravure. However, this is very complicated, very toxic, and is limited be scale and the materials for producing it are becoming harder and harder to find. We will focus on other ways to make a photo-etching plate that are more affordable, where the materials to make are not being phased out of production, and where working at a larger scale is not so complicated. We will experiment with making an etching mask with lithographic ink, offset printing this onto a copper plate, and etching it. This will require figuring out a material recipe for an ink suitable as a robust acid resist, and figuring out the output levels in photoshop, the associated curves, and the upper limit of resolution. Students are invited to join in the ‘hunt’ as much as they want. Key to this investigation is a sensibility the ‘scientific’ mindset you can pick apart a process and separate results you like from results you don’t, and conduct further experiments until it is ‘figured out.’ Additionally, this workshop will provide techniques for advanced mixing of colors worked out on the computer, as well as multiple plate layering process to make more complicated prints, a material analogy to the way that photoshop allows layers and layer masks.

Project categorySemester Project Project subjects BA/MA Visuelle Kommunikation, Malerei, Bildhauerei