Last week Chris and I tried something new. We joined seven other people for an art class at the Berkshire Art Center (BAC). We’ve been meaning to go for quite a while now. The place offers an “Art Nights Out” the 4th Friday of each month. The topic of that particular evening was Warhol Ink Blot Prints.
Check out some examples of the real deal and an explanation of how Andy Warhol made this art.
The instructor was a local school art teacher who was kicking off summer vacation by teaching us 🙂 Clearly she has a passion for teaching others about art. Even though art is definitely not my greatest strength (understatement), she made me feel really comfortable, explaining the process in great detail.
Basically we used calligraphy fountain pens, dipped them into India Ink and drew on Acetate Sheets then carefully pressed a sheet of special paper over the ink. We then touched up the drawings with watercolors. (Note: Those links are not the actual products we used. I just searched for what seemed similar.)
I was a bit nervous about having to come up with an actual drawing (and that would have been okay if I wanted to), but that does not come naturally to me. The instructor was prepared for people like me and had coloring pages we could trace. Whew! I appreciated that option.
Chris chose a coloring page from Schoolhouse Rock, and I chose butterflies (then only traced some of them and added in leaves).
It was so interesting getting use to the pens — playing with narrow lines and wider ones. Figuring out how hard to press was tricky at first. I was either too light or too globby.
We taped the paper to our sheet of acetate and opened and shut it like a book as we transferred the ink every few strokes. The absolute hardest part for me was the mirror image concept. I thought an area needed touching up so I added more ink and pressed again, and another part of the picture got all smudgy. Finally figured out I was touching up the wrong line regularly. Oops.
Whaddya think?
I’m kinda proud of it. I know it’s not museum quality, but it was super fun learning something new, and now I have a memory to hang on my wall. I look forward to going to more classes in the future.