Fox Friday: Collage Screenprinting

Screenprinting is a versatile tool for the creation of images that can be easily and quickly reproduced, making it an especially useful process for posters, zines, and other illustrated vessels for visual culture. Today, screenprinting has become synonymous with clean, vector-like images, but before the digital age, screenrprinting practitioners utilized a variety of analog methods to create their screens, including paint, cutouts and even photographic methods, resulting in images with more texture and beautiful imperfections. This workshop will embrace analog methods by demonstrating how to use collage to create screenprinted images. Participants will learn basic screenprinting processes, tools, and techniques as well as a unique method for transferring a handmade collage to a screen. Embracing the true spirit of collage, hand-cut pieces of materials from multiple sources will be combined to create a collaborative and playful shape-based image to print on posters. Leave your computers at home, and prepare to experiment and get a bit messy!

Takeaway: Each student will produce one or two screenprinted posters that they can take home based off of a collaborative screen that they produce in small groups.

Instructor: Danielle Ridolfi is a graphic designer, illustrator, and visual culture scholar. She holds an MFA in illustration and visual culture from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis where she was a Sam Fox Ambassador, and a PhD in clinical psychology from Kent State University. Her visual work includes children’s picture books, editorial illustration, and publication design. She investigates image making processes, particularly collage, that are contingent upon contact with the natural and material world. Given her background as a clinical psychologist specializing in the impact of visual culture on children and young adults, Ridolfi is particularly drawn to using theories of learning and development to guide her studio practice and her scholarly inquiries in visual culture. Her research exists at the intersection between illustration, early childhood pedagogy, and material culture.