The first two days, Saturday and Sunday, will be held at the Center for Photography in Woodstock where students will use their new digital lab to make the films necessary for gravure printing. While photogravure is a continuous tone photographic etching process, it can also be used to translate drawings better than any other printmaking technique. It beautifully keeps a range of values and the photographic qualities and tonality range in this process exceed those of a regular silver print. Photogravure prints can have an almost three dimensional, sculptural quality, with blacks that are richer than silver prints, non-reflective, and even velvety.  Copper plates will be etched in a series of salt based ferric chloride baths, to create a range of tonalities from the deepest blacks to the brightest highlights. The finished plate will be printed on the etching press with heavy rag paper. Students will leave this workshop with the tools to be able keep working on photogravures on their own

Learn the fundamentals of silkscreen, guerilla art, and graphic design while developing your own paper-based fine art/activist piece. Lead by artist and designer Libby Clarke, this class will explore the revolutionary side of silkscreen: from the WPA government propaganda posters of the 30s, to the French student posters of May '68, all the way to today's sticker artists and conceptual adbusters. We will look at how this intrinsically graphic medium has proven to be a fast, affordable, and effective means of broadcasting your message. You will come away from this class with handouts and knowledge to help you continue printing as well as a finished multicolor edition of your own message-based piece.

Participants will learn the basic skills of silkscreening: how to stretch a screen, photo emulsion stenciling, hand-drawn stenciling, designing for silkscreen, registration of multi-color prints, and wheatpasting posters.

Join WSW in collaboration with R&F Handmade Paints as we work with two of the most sensual two-dimensional art mediums. The first three days of this class will be held at WSW, where we will cover basic painterly monoprinting, stencil, and transfer methods, emphasizing a quick and free pace of working, and experimentation with a wide variety of printing papers. We will consider these printed elements as "potentials" – items that we may combine, layer and compose to create images using hot wax at R&F Handmade Paints during the last two days.

This intensive workshop is designed for printmakers who primarily work in etching as a print medium.  Using your current work and ideas as a catalyst, Shelley will help you discover what aspects of your prints are unique to you and how to explore and expand your vision. Shelley will begin the workshop with a series of demonstrations and sessions to spark ways of thinking about making etchings. Students will work one on one with Shelley to look at the student’s current and past work (that may include recent prints and drawings, ideas, sketchbooks, digital images, slides or whatever is comfortable for you) and discuss what you would like to accomplish. Students may re-examine ways of using color and printing, such as stencils a la poupe, chine colle, viscosity, multiple plates, relief, collage, digital media, paper lithography, photocopy transfer and registration techniques.  Other considerations could involve the re-thinking of issues such as content, scale, series, multiplicity, format, paper choice, available matrices and how to successfully convey your vision.The purpose of this class is to activate and accelerate your individual artistic development and generate momentum in all of your art making practices.