Printmaking and a hike
11 Jul 2012 Leave a Comment
We went up to Evergreen for a brown bag lunch lecture and printmaking exhibit. We got pegged as homeschoolers from the get-go. Why is that? It’s summer, so kids could end up at a museum for a lecture, maybe it was the fact that the girls brought the printing stuff they recently did, maybe it was the questions they asked. I don’t think we exude ‘Homeschool’, but apparently we do. At any rate, we listened to a nice lecture about types of printmaking.
There are 4 main types: relief, intaglio, planography (flat surface or lithography), and serigraphy (or stencil type – screen printing.) There is woodcutting, which gives a very nice print in relief (like both of these by Mr. Sumner.)
A linocut is where you engrave a design on linoleum, it’s softer and therefore you can make a more detailed print (if you want to.)
Lithography takes advantage of the resistance between oil and water. You paint (or draw with an oil based paint) on smooth limestone the areas you want to transfer and water the other areas. Silk screen uses a stencil kind of process to print an image through silk.
Etched prints are carved into a metal plate with acid, then printed from that plate. Intaglio is a kind of printmaking where the print is made from the recessed areas of the plate (the opposite of relief printing where the highest areas are what is printed.) Aquatint is a kind of printing that ends up looking like watercolor, the plate is covered in resin and acid is used to eat through the layers of resin. Monotype is a kind of printing where ink or paint is used to make one print of the piece (this is what the girls did, a relief kind of monotype since they only made one copy at a time of the piece.) There are many other types of printmaking too, such as UV and solar (think sun prints) and a using a combination printing methods. The girls showed off their prints and we got some ideas about how to make some woodcuts and screen printing. One helpful tip from Mr. Sumner was to paint the block of wood black and then use a white pencil to draw the areas you want to carve out.
After that we went to Lower Maxwell falls for a hike.
Based on the amount of water in the creek we didn’t think there would be anything in the falls, so we only hiked 3 miles (1.5 in and back.)
The air smelled like pine and it was nice and cool. It was uphill the whole way and even though there were rocks in the path, there was enough pine padding to make the trail soft. Flowers and plants along the trail.
Because there is a water source running though the area there is lots of green; ferns, grasses, flowers and of course trees.
This tree had a message, the girls were quick to spot a grammar mistake (see it?)
We rubbed the bark from a couple of aspen trees for some extra mosquito protection (you can also make the leaves into a tea if you have a headache.)
The aspens rustle in even the slightest breeze, so we walked to the melody of quaking leaves for the most part. We played on a fallen tree and climbed some rock outcroppings and breathed in the air…it was nice.
This is a great summer hike because of the shade, it would be nice if the falls had enough water to fall, but it’s a nice hike either way.
It’s 3.6 miles on Brook forest road off of County road 73 in Evergreen to the lower falls parking lot, I think there is an upper falls lot too a bit further down.
