Styrofoam Tigers

Last night I went with my friends (one of whom is fellow blogger Kimberli Johnson) to the Springville Art Museum 'college night.' They had a live band, light refreshments, a scavenger hunt, and best of all: late museum hours. One of the things we stumbled upon toward the end of the night was this little 'try printmaking' station. (We should have seen it when we came in, as it was right by the entrance, but, there's our powers of observation for ya)

It was set up with pencils, and squares of styrofoam plates. The picnic kind. We 'etched' into the plates by drawing hard with the pencil, then printed using a little brayer and tempera paint setup they had in the next room. A really simple and inexpensive way to do something very similar to woodblock printing.

This is a digital mashup of two separate prints. I haven't altered the images at all except to register them, turn the blue paint black, and add the old paper effect behind.

The whole process took less than an hour, including 'drawing' time and I took home 10 prints, and gave away three. I kept one 'good' print of the four that turned out, but the rest were either bad impressions or reverse prints, made when I tried rolling the used brayer onto a piece of paper after inking the styrofoam 'block.' The reverse printing gave some pretty cool effects in and of itself. This is one of the rolled-brayer reverse prints:

Something really interesting about this is that almost every single one had a different texture to it. The thick tempera paint sometimes created a stipple-dot effect, or even lobed 'veins' of paint when viewed close up. I've done digital mimics of woodblock printing before, but this is where digital art just really isn't as good at faking it: Nothing makes spontaneity in marks as well as real media.