Teachin’ The Yout’s

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of teaming up with expert printer Andy MacDougall to present a two day workshop at Coronado Studio in Austin, Texas. Andy’s been in the business since solvent inks were king, and is especially well known for his modern textbook on screenprinting, Screenprinting Today. I met Andy during the SGIA industry conference in Atlanta a few years back, which I highly recommend to anyone with a budding print nerd tendency to check out. You’ll see machines beat you at nearly every imaginable task in the print world, but it’s an inspiring loss to be weathered.

Although Andy is an accomplished printer in his own right, I think his best work is done sharing his philosophy towards printing, and specifically print education, with students. All too often, first experiences in printing are dealt out in under-equipped, antiquated university shops, which seem to have a lock on screenprinting education in the states. It’s ridiculous to expect a painting department to deny students modern brushes and paints, but the equivalent practice happens every day in printmaking departments with hand-stretched screens, block-out fluid stencils, and punch tab registration. No wonder everyone I meet tells me that they tried screenprinting and thought it was “too hard.”

At our workshop however, it seems like everyone had a good handle on the process. I think this just proves that printing doesn’t have to be a difficult concept, but it does require attention to details.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 9:05 pm and is filed under News and tagged with class, demo, flatstock, how-to, poster contest, teaching, workshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.