The Art of Printmaking: Layers of Light, Texture, and Story

Presented by Patricia Hunter McGrath and Christina Bianchi

Saturday, November 22, 2025

9:00 AM – 3:00 PM

Cost $110 Includes a light breakfast

Workshop Overview

Join us for a full day of joyful experimentation and discovery through printmaking. In this hands-on atelier experience, participants will explore both the science and poetry of image-making — learning to create fascinating textured surfaces through print. Together we will explore: making our own gelatin plates, transferring photographic images with matte medium, and working with archival tissue paper prints to build layered, translucent compositions.

Through processes that balance inquiry, process and the unexpected, we’ll ask how materials can help us capture memory, tell new stories and work with layers as well as how printmaking becomes a language for transformation.

Together we will explore:

🌸 Making Your Own Gelatin Plates — learn to mix, pour, and experiment with surfaces that invite surprise and discovery. We will also experiment with premade plates.
📸 Create Photo Transfers with Matte Medium — lift and layer imagery in unexpected ways.
📜 Archival Tissue Paper Prints — create ethereal transparencies that invite new meaning when layered.
🎨 Layering, Composition & Color — explore how intention, accident, and curiosity meet on the printing surface.

As well as consider:

🪶 How can printmaking serve as a language of traces, echoes, and memory?
🪶 What stories emerge when we layer images, materials, and gestures?
🪶 How might transparent materials invite us to see both what is visible and what is hidden?
🪶 What happens when we shift from “making an image” to “listening to what the materials want to say”?
🪶 How do we know when a print is “finished”? Or is it ever?

What to Bring

A few printed or photocopied black & white images (laser prints work best)
Curiosity, playfulness, and a willingness to get your hands messy