Printing Expressionist Houses

At the beginning of Twentieth Century the art movements of Expressionists in Germany and Fauves in France bring an important news in the field of Modern art: the vision of reality is filtered by the artists’ inner reality. Before them Van Gogh and Munch have taught the same lesson because in their paintings the world is transformed and distorted by the artist’s feeling and mood. 8th Grade students redesigned a picture of a Victorian house, drawing a sketch inspired by the picture. The sketch on paper has the same size of the picture, and it has to be “expressive”, with distorted line and perspective, with thick and angular lines in an Expressionist style. The lines of the sketch have been traced over with a black marker, creating black and white areas.

 

 

 

Our printing plate is made of synthetic rubber (Adigraf) and the next step is to trace the drawing on it. First we trace over the back of the sketch with a soft pencil: we have to redraw the black areas on the back side of the drawing, placing it on a window. In this way we obtain a surface drawn with soft graphite.

In order to tranfer the drawing on the rubber we placed the sketch with the colored back side on the plate, ad we traced it again on the original sketch with a colored pencil. With this final process we stamped our drawing on the rubbery surface of the printing plate. In this way we defined the areas that have to be engraved (white or empty areas) and the areas that have to be left in relief (black areas). The printing plate then has been engraved with different gouges.

 

 

 

 

The prints have been done with black ink on 4 different base supports:

1. on white paper
2. on paper painted with watercolors
3. on a magazine page with writing
4. on a magazine page with a colored picture