Printing, Printing, Printing

By Jessica Datema

With the end of the semester quickly approaching this means a number of assignments are expected to be completed; as second years the expectation is greater, as graduation is now upon us.

For our final semester many of the assignments this term allowed us to test our knowledge by applying these skills to working on our biggest projects; one of the skills we learned from our instructor Richard Beland was printing, throughout our first year we were able to learn the fundamentals of how to print by being assigned a printing mentor.

Printing isn’t hard but it’s a process, with three printers provided to us from the school this has been beneficial being able to print in the studio and having the ability to print during work periods and after school time, printing requires as much time as we are willing to put into it; this can mean many different things,

-Resizing, (this can be done manually with our macs,
we’ve been taught a method called stair stepping this
means resizing the image by going up 110 percent each
time until size is achieved)

-Utilizing 4x6 test prints, this allows us to save the
bigger sized printing paper for the final print,
depending on the situation sometimes using as many
test prints can help determine every detail of an image
for the overall look.

-Resizing not only the image size but the resolution
with the printers is 360, this can happen by resizing by
20.

-And finally printing! Using a good eye is key to
determining whether a print is usable or not.

We’ve been fortunate enough to have been provided these tips during our first year with our assigned printing partners, they were required to work with us on printing for their own assignments as well.