Art surrounds East High School as you walk through the halls. There are murals lining random walls on nearly every floor and posters bouncing around, advertising one topic or another, but what about wearing art? Senior Natalie Romero is in East High School’s print club and can tell you everything there is to know about wearing your own art piece.
Print club is a space where most people can feel comfortable, all the way up in room 4009M at East High School, ran by East High School art teacher Ryan Koning.
“I’m glad I joined, and I recommend it, it’s fun watching a design you drew come to life,” Romero said.
“I connect myself to art in general a lot because art can be in many things like cooking or listening to music or painting or sewing and I like doing all of those things, because they’re calming,” Romero said.
Although it may look scary or complicated, it is a chance to create something that is a person’s very own clothing or item, making a memory that can mean so much even if it’s as little as making your own design on a shirt, hat, or bag.
“Print Club is a fun way to learn something cool and new, you’ll get to see how simple stuff such as a design on your shirt could be made, and the best part is, you’re not limited to certain designs because you make your own designs,” Sophomore Mya Rodriguez said.
Many students who do art all have one thing in common, passion, and with something like Print club, it can be an opportunity to connect with other people who enjoy art just as much as you.
“I joined print club because I was interested in learning more about printing and the process of it,” Romero said.
“Print Club is an amazing club with many people there having fun and getting along, Mrs. Koning is an amazing teacher and gets along with everyone quickly, your art skills don’t have to be good, it’s all for the fun of it,” Rodriguez said.
If you want your very own shirt design, being in print club can give you that opportunity. You can create something like your favorite lyrics from a song, a drawing or picture of your pet, a phrase you made up on your own or a design as simple as a smiley face.
“Print making is my favorite type of art making, and I think a lot of people don’t really know about it, so I started a print club to make it more well-known among students and give students a chance to do make cool projects they might not be able to make in a typical art class, also, some students had told me they wanted to learn how to make their own “merch”, so I thought, ‘why not?’,” Koning said.
Printing can be a difficult process if you look at it from afar, but when you see everything there is to it, you see how simple it really is. First is prepping the “canvas” which is a wooden frame with a thick mesh stretched tightly over it. On the mesh is an emulsion that is used to burn your art piece onto the canvas. The process of burning it is using a UV light. The photo-sensitive emulsion reacts and gets burned through and that’s how you create your design to print onto a shirt, bag, sweater, etc. The actual printing process uses printing ink with a squeegee, firmly pressing down on the board and swiping it across the mesh where the design is at a 45-degree angle. Before doing this, make sure to put a piece of paper or cardboard between the two pieces of fabric, e.g.: put a cardboard piece in a shirt to prevent bleeding on the other side. But what is it called? The correct term is screen printing.
“Print club is a super fun way to learn a new skill, we focus on screen-printing designs on posters, tote bags, and t-shirts but plan to explore other types of print making later on, I think people might assume screen-printing is really difficult to learn how to do, but it is actually pretty simple when you have someone helping you learn how to do it,” Koning said.
“My favorite art teacher has the club so that is another reason why I joined, it seemed fun,” Romero said.
If you would like to join, you can sign up. The club is going to be creating a fund-raiser that will be selling the print club’s very own merch, all from students in the club.
“Come to print club, we meet Tuesday afternoons in my classroom (4009M). We are hoping to start selling T-shirts and other pieces of merch soon once we have our design finished,” Koning said.