Snow College Printmaking Workshop

This past week I was able to go back to Snow College where I studied art for 3 years and take a week long printmaking workshop taught by Stefanie Dykes. She was an amazing person to meet and work with! I learned a lot, got a lot of feedback and received a lot of printmaking references and names of working printmakers.

Stefanie is the co-founder of Saltgrass Printmakers in Salt Lake Utah, which is a studio where people can come into and use the presses for their work, take classes and participate in workshops. Her link to Saltgrass is www.SaltgrassPrintmakers.org

During the course of the week we worked on a number of prints. One of the neat things she showed us this week was a simple way to keep a multi-color print registered perfectly. She called this method of registration the "Kento" registration method. From what you can see in the photo, I have a tan board with my print in the center and a strip of white running along the upper edge of the board. 

How we created these was we took a larger Masonite board, Its smooth on the front side and has a rough texture on the back. Flipping the Masonite to the back side we took 2 strips of matte board and glued them to the board with rubber cement. These two strips are for the corner of your paper so you can lay your paper down in the exact place every time. From the edge of the 2 strips of matte board we measured out 1 1/2 Inches from the top and from the side. This space is for the margin so that we have equal space around the print. Mark it and that's where you will put the edge of  print material like Sintra, Linoleum, or wood. Glue the printing material with rubber cement to the Masonite. After both the Linoleum and matte board are glued to the Masonite we coated the whole thing (minus the linoleum) with an acrylic gel medium so that when you're inking up your image, if you get ink on your board you can wipe it off easily so the ink doesn't get on your paper.

Here i'm inking my plate with my 3rd color. The registration is really really simple and pretty difficult to mess up. You just lay the corner of the paper in the corner of the matte board every time and the image should be in the exact place!

Here is my print after the 2nd color. 

 Here is my finished print. Just an non-objected print I did to explore shape, line and color. This is a 4 color print and the registration was really easy on this. Doing other multi-color prints with other various registration methods, this is the method I now prefer.