1st Year Drypoint Portraits

Here are some of the drypoint portraits that the 1st years printed recently. Some of them are self-portraits and others are portraits of classmates and family members.

Amy Kiernan

Orla Molloy

Maedhbh Honan

Aisling Kane

Suzanne Evers

Catherine Finn

Sana Baloch

Chloe Bickmore

Niamh Markey

Saska Prinsen

2nd Yr Screen Prints

2nd year students created these fabric prints of shoes using the screen printing technique. After they printed all of their colours they used some creative stitching to embellish their print.

Chloe Duff

Cienna Quiwa

Rebecca Matthews

Chloe Whelan

Ellen Matthews

Grainne McCloskey

Shannon Clarke

Aoife Dunne

Kelly-Ann Owens

Alison Walsh

Niamh Dunne

5th Yr Woodcuts

The 5th Years recently completed woodcuts based on street scenes from around Drogheda. The prints had to be influenced by German Expressionist woodcuts and include some of their stylistic qualities. Expressionism is a term that describes art that uses distortions and exaggerations in shape and/or colour to express the artist’s emotion. The German Expressionists distorted images in quite a primitive manner. They exaggerated angles and carved crooked lines, giving an impression that they hacked away at the wood at a frenzied pace, adding to its intensity and expressive quality.

German Expressionist Woodcut

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
Elisabeth-Ufer (Berlin), 1912
Woodcut

The Process

  The students started by creating drawings from photographs of various streets in Drogheda. They worked over their drawing using markers to block in areas of tone using pattern and line to create their expressionistic design for the woodcut. Once they were happy with the design they transferred it on to the wood block using carbon paper and cut the design out using lino-cutting tools.

Clockwise from above left: photographic source,

drawing, woodcut design, final print

all by Clare Fagan

Design by Christina Lynch

        Finished Print                                                                                         Finished Print

Finished Prints by Josephine Byrne

Finished Prints by Aoife Sharkey

1st Year - Portraits

The first years were introduced to two printmaking methods with this project; relief printing and intaglio printing. Here is a link to the MoMA website which has an excellent interactive way of explaining the various types of printmaking.  What a is Print? The students began with some observational drawing by sketching portraits of each other using line. They worked over their drawings entering in small amounts of tone where parts of the head, face and neck might be in shadow. We looked at how Vincent Van Gogh used tone in his self-portraits.

The first type of print the first years produced was an engraving. They transferred their drawings onto photographic paper which acts as an etching plate. Once the outline of the drawing was transferred they had to scratch or engrave the lines into the surface of the plate using a needle.

Here are two examples of the etching plates after the drawings have been scratched in.

The plates are inked up by rubbing a mixture of oil paint and linseed oil into the scratches. The plate then needs to be polished using newspaper so that the ink remains only in the scratches and is cleaned away elsewhere. Once the plate has been polished, a sheet of good quality paper that has been soaked in water for ten minutes, and allowed to dry for ten minutes, is placed on top of the plate. A printing press is ideal to press the paper into the plate in order to force the paper into the scratches to soak up the ink. We used a spoon on the back of the paper to make the prints.

Engraving by Ester Ceuvas

Engraving by Jade Heeney

The next process was to create a design for the lino print. Here are some examples of German Expressionist woodcuts that we discussed. 

The students firstly created their design by drawing over their original pencil drawings and dividing the face in to shapes of black and white, depending on what areas were in shadow or light. They then cut their designs into black sugar paper and stuck them down on white paper. Here are the results.

By Ester Ceuvas

By Eleanor Selby

by Sarah Branigan

2nd Year - Cardboard Prints

The 2nd Years had an introduction to relief printmaking using corrugated cardboard. They started by making some interior and exterior architectural drawings of their environment: of the art room, the school buildings and rooms at home. After choosing their favourite drawing the students broke it down into various shapes, attributing white, mid-tone or black to each of the shapes. They then transferred their design onto the corrugated card and cut away the white shapes, peeled back the mid-tone shapes to the lines of the corrugation and left the surface of the cardboard for the black.

Below are examples of the finished result.

by Shauna Arnold

by Chloe Byrne