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Day 18: Printmaking, inspired by teaching

On Thursday, I led the students in the Journal and Sketchbook class in an hour of automatic drawing. There was lots of scribbling and furious gestural movements. All 16 of the students produced really free, chaotic drawings.

In preparation for going to the studio, I was in Kinko's taking photocopies of lots of found images from the internet, which I am using in the Lucerne Project. I also photocopied the Sharpie drawings that I did in the last few days, so I can turn them into acrylic skins. Then at the back of my sketchbook, I found a few squiggles of crayon that I'd drawn in order to illustrate the process of automatic drawing to the students. I decided it would be fun to enlarge some of these marks up to 400%, then turn the page a little and repeat, just to see what came out.

So I used the paper-litho transfer process to transfer the images to Kitakawa paper, a beautiful Japanese handmade printmaking paper that has an ochre-beige colour. The results were, as our American cousins say, 'quite awesome':


When the ink is dry, I might bind them using a pamphlet stitch, to make a small artist's book.

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