When thinking about the suggested prompt for this week’s blog post, “the lesser-known or the underrepresented,” the idea that came up for me was is how the Printmaking Facilities at Columbia College Chicago seem to still be flying relatively under-the-radar to Graphic Design students.

This has been changing, in the past few semesters, largely because Publication Design professors have campaigned for and gained access to use the Risograph machines for their classes. However, in my 15-week Silkscreening class this semester, the majority of students are still Fine Arts or Illustration majors. A similar, though slightly more diverse, makeup of majors took part in my Printmaking I class last spring semester.

I wanted to use this blog post to highlight how I have drawn a connection between printmaking and my graphic design work so far. Because of my (somewhat unfortunate) discovery that I don’t love working on the computer for long periods, once I arrived at Columbia, I have often used printmaking practices to give a more tactile, hands-on feel to my graphic design work. This often takes longer, and is more complicated than if I were to just buckle down and do everything in Illustrator and Photoshop – but sometimes it’s a lot more fun. When one is feeling stuck, uninspired, or creatively blocked, I find that approaching a project from a “weird”, or alternate, angle often creates interesting, and hopefully inspiring, results.

The first project I will highlight is from the Spring ’23 semester (spring of my sophomore year) when I took Graphic Design II. One of our assignments in that class was to design a set of icons. I was having a hard time condensing my sketches into something that would be usable as an icon – legible at any size, enough detail to describe what was depicted but not too much so that they become overcomplicated and unscalable. I decided to try a different approach, and hand-cut my designs out of paper and screenprint my icons.

While my icons were still too detailed overall, and my process took me a lot longer than others in my class, my professor appreciated how I took my own spin on this project, and that I was unafraid to approach the assignment from an alternative vantage point.

Another project I will highlight where I exhibited my graphic design tendencies was a piece created in my 5-week Foundation Skill: Silkscreening class that I took in the Fall ’22 semester (fall of my sophomore year). One of our first explorations in the class of how to compose an image on the silkscreen to print was with hand-cut paper imagery, as I used in the project above. However, I definitely did not start out doing that detailed of images.

In this Foundation Skill class, I created a three-layer, three color poster print using two layers of hand-cut imagery and one layer of ink wash painted on a transparency sheet. The hand-cut layers were taped onto the screen to block ink, as shown above, and the ink wash layer was exposed onto the photo-emulsion coated screen using an exposure unit.

While this project was not as directly related to design as my icons project was, I still feel like it showcases a lot of the attributes that I value in my graphic design work – focusing on layering, contrast, and use of shapes in a composition.

The cut strips that I included above ended up being part of a background for a sticker project at the end of the 5 week class! I used the above layout and a split fountain technique of mixing inks into a gradient to make fun take-away stickers for everyone in my class. I drew out various fun shapes and laid out text in Illustrator that said “screenprinting was fun – ccc fall ’22 session 2”. I kiss cut the shapes of the stickers into a piece of sticker paper using a Cricut machine. Then I screenprinted the colorful geometric background onto that sticker sheet, screenprinted the black text layer on top of that, and then covered the sheet with a glossy plastic sticker layer before cutting out around each individual sticker. It was a fun way to give back to my classmates after our final critique!

All of this is to say – if anyone reading is a Columbia College Chicago design student, and has time before their graduation to register for a silkscreening or printmaking class, I highly recommend it. It may bring a whole new perspective to your design work – and you will certainly make connections with other students from all types of majors. Thanks for reading this post!