In addition to my work in the commercial printing field, I do art therapy work with my fiancee. We teach autistic students to make art. We do everything from drawing to painting to sculpture to custom printing.
In past issues of the PIE Blog I have written about a number of the techniques of custom printing that we have brought to our students, and in the last week I have been studying one that we have not yet used: collography. I'd like to briefly describe this technique along with another one I just discovered in researching Andy Warhol for a recent painting class. His technique was called “the blotting line,” and this along with his tracing work developed into the Pop Art custom screen printing for which he was famous. Finally, I want to describe “monotyping,” a third technique I plan to share with my fiancee's and my autistic students.
A long-standing consulting client of mine designs print books for the World Bank, the United Nations, and other governmental and non-governmental agencies. She pays me to review her designs over the phone with her, page by page. She started as an editor, and over the years I have helped her learn to also be a print book designer. She's very good. Sometimes I look at her work and say to myself, “I wish I had designed that.”
I've been looking for new art projects my fiancee and I can share with our autistic students. Having been in the field of custom printing for over 40 years, I'm particularly drawn to hand-crafted approaches to what have become the super-automated technologies of commercial printing.
I spend a lot of time in thrift stores with my fiancee. She looks at the clothes; I go for the print books. In fact, I’ve collected quite a library of textbooks, which I have used since graduating from college to augment my education (and particularly my knowledge of commercial printing, art, and business).
A commercial printing client whom I have mentioned before regularly reprints a series of color swatch books during the year. They are a bit like miniature PMS color swatch books, but their purpose is to help my client’s clients choose colors for make-up and clothing based on their complexions.
On the one hand I like it when new words are created. I was a Literature major in college. On the other hand, I know to look closely when this happens. (An example is when Photoshop was turned from a noun—the computer program—into a verb, as in “just Photoshop” the image, meaning “Turn the fuzzy, low-res image into a crisp, press-ready photo.”