This Week at WSW: Roxanne Faber Savage and Kerr Gabowski

August 10, 2013 by Ruth McKinney Burket

Roxanne has taken the printmaking studio by storm and her students are right behind her. Experimenting with scale and a variety of techniques, Roxanne and her crew have managed to bust out some amazing prints this week. They have learned how to make both miniature and large scale prints using techniques of carborundum aquatint, plexiglass intaglio, and paper lithography.

Roxanne did a demo about Chine-collé, a technique that adds colored paper to a print: thin pieces of colored paper are glued and then placed onto the intaglio plate once it is inked and ready to print. The pressure of the etching press makes the print more textural and variegated. Happy Chine-collé’ing!

Roxanne with her beloved glue bottle

Hooray for a super successful print!

Chine-collé technique

Chine-collé technique: intaglio plate before the press, and print after the press

Kerr has been busy in the silkscreen studio teaching students a thing or two about surface design. She has developed a technique using fabric dyes and kelp extract, which dry in the screen and then reactivate with sodium alginate, the best paste for modern printing and dyeing. Kerr prints these screens, sometimes with multiple colors, until the original dye has disintegrated. The artist is left with multiples of the same dye stencil with varying prints. If you want to illuminate your print even further, which Kerr encourages, you can hand paint dye or draw with charcoal, pastels, and graphite. It’s all about the mark-making — so mark it up!