Printmaking art class

Today was the final Summer Sunday Series of Six art classes at the Louisville Visual Arts Center. It was an ambitious undertaking for someone with a bad hand and I'd have to admit, I could do very little of this in the future and only for short periods of time. Today I WAY over did it and will pay for it dearly at work tomorrow.
That said, it was a really fun and very interesting class that went two hours over the appointed time. Some were done close to 4 PM, but she graciously stayed beyond 6PM when I left.
Debby Stratford was our instructor, she has been printmaking over 20 years. This was the class description-

"This class will explore the softer side of relief printmaking. Using Gomuban, an easy to carve vinyl rubber plate that holds very fine details, we will explore relief printmaking with this great new product. We will use a small press to print."

Lest I get ahead of myself, we had a delicious lunch to start with from the Cheddar Box, I mentioned them when I took the class with Laurie Doctor. Here a pic! Who can't enjoy a class that starts with a good ham sandwich (there was tuna, chicken salad, turkey wrap, corned beef, and tenderloin, too) bow-tie pasta salad with asparagus, sun dried tomatoes and peppers, fruit salad, pickle and a cookie?

We first explored just making shapes with white tempera paint on black paper with a variety of materials and textures. I used folded cardboard, made a "rake" out of cardboard, which I ended up using for my pattern quite a bit, some honeycomb shaped lace, a plastic circle from a pet syringe, a wooden stick, plastic fork from lunch, corrugated box and just about anything else you could think of. Can you find the little hooks your hang Christmas lights from the gutters?

Once we made a lot of designs, we chose the ones we liked best, cut them out and arranged them on a new piece of black paper. This would be our guide for our plate.
I ended up doodling around a bit more and using more of my second piece than my first.

Once we had our design, we replicated it somewhat on the rubber. We cut along the white lines we made. Being a little OC, I had to FILL my space with design. Lesson learned, it is actually more effective to leave a little more uncut area than I did for effect.

I did a lot of cutting at the aforementioned price to my hand. I could have done less and had a great plate, too. I also could have switched to a larger bevel sooner, but I didn't see them. I do like the exploration of a lot of designs and textures.

Overall, I'm happy with my plate. I'm sorry I didn't have it for our black and white theme for the atc swap this month. But, I plan to use the prints I made for atc backgrounds.

Had we not run out of time, it would have been great to print enough for each of us to give one of ours to everyone else and go home with 12 different designs.

We used a small press and did printing by hand without a press, which was good for me since I don't have access to one. It is harder to get a dark, consistent print by hand.

I feel an early bedtime coming on.