I love it when my work as a commercial printing broker and designer overlaps with the art therapy work my fiancee and I do with the autistic. Granted there’s always room in our class to discuss principles of design, which I am increasingly aware pertain to both the fine arts and the graphic arts. But most recently my fiancee came up with an art project that involved incising and then printing styrofoam plates made from the packages used to wrap food in the grocery store.
The Styrofoam Printing Project
Relief printing has been around for a long time. Probably at some time in your life, most of you have cut designs into half a potato and then inked up the raised portions and then pressed this printing block onto paper. In art class some of you have done the same with linoleum blocks or wood blocks.
Everything raised above the surface of the plate accepts ink and then transfers it to the paper. Everything you have gouged out of the potato, linoleum block, or wood block sits below the surface and therefore takes no ink and therefore does not print.
To apply this to our project for the autistic, we had the students plan a drawing (conceived with the help of numerous samples printed out from Google Images) and then transfer it to the front of the styrofoam sheet (an approximately 4” x 6” area once the edges of the food trays had been cut off).
The autistic members first drew the images on the styrofoam with pencils or markers, and then used styli of various kinds to deepen and widen the lines of the drawings. For this purpose we used pencils (for their points, not their colors), skewers intended for making chicken sate and shish kebab (for their pointed end), and other implements for leather working, cooking (including forks), and working with clay (metal scoops with sawlike edges to create texture, for instance).
I repeated a number of times throughout the project that anything cut into the plate would not accept a film of ink when we spread custom printing ink over the styrofoam using a brayer (a rubber roller that lays down an even film of ink on wood printing blocks, linoleum blocks, or in our case styrofoam printing plates).
The autistic members and their aides (parents or professional caregivers) developed their drawings and then incised their plates. Some made light cuts in the styrofoam (which when printed provided a subtle or ghostlike image). Others cut deeply into the styrofoam, and their final prints were coarser, more blocky, and in many ways similar to wood block prints.
I noted that the ink (whether blue or orange or black) would either print or not print, but that the members and aides could not make a dark blue print as a light blue. I taught the members and aides how to do hatching (patterns of parallel lines) and cross-hatching to create lighter areas of ink. I noted that the human eye would read hatching and cross-hatching as a light screen, much as a halftone screen in commercial printing can make areas printed only in black ink look like various shades of gray.
When the autistic members and their aides had finished inscribing the designs into their styrofoam plates, my fiancee and I came around with ink and a brayer, and inked up the member’s printing plates. We showed them how to cover only the raised parts of the design with ink while avoiding letting the ink seep into the lines they had cut into the plates. (For the most part this was easy, since the ink is thick and tacky, so the brayer will deposit it evenly on the topmost raised portions of the styrofoam plates without its seeping into the incised designs.)
The next step was to have each autistic member choose custom printing paper and then place the plate ink-side down on the sheet. Then we flipped the plate and paper over, and taught the members how to use a spoon to provide even pressure across the plate by rubbing back and forth on the back of the sheet. In this way each member could transfer the image from the styrofoam plate onto the printing paper.
When we peeled back the paper to release it from the styrofoam printing plates, so many of the people in the room fell in love with the process. Many wanted to go home and do more of this work immediately. There was something almost primal about gouging an image into a plate, inking it up, and then transferring the image onto paper.
To complete the project we provided large shoebox tops (we had collected multiple boxes donated for the purpose by a shoestore) to the members. Autistic members then glued both the custom printing plate and the printed sheet side by side into the boxtop “frames.”
Seeing the prints and the plates from which they had been produced side by side reminded me (and I mentioned this to the students) that custom printing is an art as well as a craft, and that seeing the inked-up plates along with their prints put the focus on printing as a process, not just a final art piece. The process of cutting the design into the styrofoam, inking up the plate, and making a print was at least as important as the final print itself.
How This Relates to Printing (What You Can Learn from This Case Study)
If you are a graphic designer or print buyer, it doesn’t hurt to know a little about the history of custom printing. It can help you to understand the ways technology has improved upon (or made easier) the original printing processes and also shed light on the art behind the craft of commercial printing.
The earliest printing presses (as well as the ones you often see in use at Renaissance Festivals) are based on the relief printing process. Printing plates with raised images (type and later halftone images) are inked up, paper is placed over the type and image, and intense weight is brought down upon the custom printing plate and paper. This yields a single printed sheet. Then the process is repeated.
Such a “relief” printing process is exactly the paradigm for “letterpress,” the printing process that preceded offset printing. In fact, due to the beauty of the process, many designers are going back to letterpress for specialty work such as invitations and printed envelopes because both the process and the product of letterpress relief printing hold such artistic merit.
So in your own work (much of which is divided between offset printing and digital printing), be mindful of the alternatives. For some of your projects, the texture letterpress can provide (the raised letters and shapes of the printing plate will actually sink into the custom printing paper and leave indentations) will make your printed pieces unique and special, in a way that gives pleasure to the touch and that also hearkens back to an earlier and perhaps simpler time.
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on Monday, June 26th, 2017 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Fine Art Printing.
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