Having knowledge in all areas of art is good to have for any illustrator, which is why printmaking is part of the illustration major at Marywood University. It is a different way to express your creativity and forces you to work in another medium for a new way to create your art. Basic printmaking is a lot fun and we learn a lot about printmaking techniques such as working with linoleum, woodcut, and mixed media approaches. We had recently finished up our last project which had to do with collagraphs.

A collagraph is kind of like a mixed media print, you need to combine many different materials to be able to make one print. This consists of some type of board for the backing where certain materials are glued on top of to be printed later on. You can basically attach anything to the board that is thin enough not to break the paper while going through the press. It is not like a typical print where you can have a subject, it is more of glueing objects down that would give the print a nice texture, etc.

For our collagraph project, we glued down materials like string, sandpaper, cheesecloth, tape, paper, and we could also used modge podge. Once all of our material was glued down we had to seal it with even more glue. Finally we were able to run it through the press and turn in our final prints. In the end this was a cool project to try being able to work with materials in a more abstract way was super fun!

Collagraph plate made of string, tape, and sandpaper.