Summer School: Relief Printing with Mandeep Dhadialla

An immersive exploration into the world of colour seen as a sense of place and belonging through the lens of plants - working with natural inks, and linocut printmaking. Gathering together from a point of slow and mindful mark-making, sprinkled with moments of reflective sketching, and layered emotional colour mapping, this course invites participants to consider their own experience with nature and their place in it. Engage with the living world of plants in a multi-faceted approach by creating pieces of work ranging from painting with earth and plant matter, visual colour collecting, to colour mixing and producing relief-printed collages. Suitable for beginners and anyone interested in colour connection.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of the course, participants will:

Understand how to work with colour as a response to nature connection

Be introduced to natural inks as a painting medium

Have the opportunity to mix natural ink from prepared samples

Be encouraged to develop their own research through reflective questions

Understand how to approach research and record ideas in different ways

Produce a collection of sketch, colour and print studies

Develop work combining linocut printed collages with natural ink papers

Course Structure:

Day 1:

Introduction and Creating Reference Material

• Introduction to course overview

• Colour and Connection - short artist talk

• Basic insight into research and visual data collecting

• Introduction to natural ink made from soil, leaves, turmeric and avocado

• Mixing natural inks from prepared earth, plant and root samples

• Explorations into mark-making using natural inks on handmade papers

• Explorations into mark-making on linocut blocks combined with block shapes

Day 2:

Research day at Leicester Botanic Gardens

• Short talk about gathering research - visual and reflective approaches Emotional colour mapping as sense of place and belonging

• Demonstration on working with pastels, paint sticks, crayons and other drawing mediums, following on from previous mark-making exercises

• Visual colour collecting working with drawing mediums

• Reflective questions and dedicated quiet study time for own research in relation to colour connection

• Gather together for shared conversation about collecting research

Day 3:

Colour Explorations and Printing

• Develop an understanding of how we view colour and how to translate that into emotional connection for creating layered relief print collages

• Basic colour mixing talk and demonstration with relief printing inks

• Colour mixing exercises working from a Payne’s Grey base

• Printing linocut blocks techniques - composition and overlaying - with option to share linocut blocks amongst peers

Day 4:

Project Development

• Printing over natural ink papers

• Continued self-led exploration on personal projects, with guided tutor support and shared peer-to-peer learning

Day 5:

Project Completion and Course Reflections

• Create collages from selected linocuts combined with overlaying of natural ink sheets

• Incorporate simple stitch for layered paper elements

• Finalise project pieces

• Gather for conversational course reflection

About the Tutor

Mandeep Dhadialla is an artist printmaker living in Leicester. Her work draws inspiration from her childhood in Kenya and migrating to England in her early teens. Mandeep’s fascination with exploring how people and the landscape are in an interconnected exchange are reflected through colour and light play. Her current body of work examines how landscape provides a source of constant anchoring between inner emotional and outer physical displacement as prints and sketches which often incorporate vivid colour palettes to reflect inner/outer connection as glowing light and luminosity, seeking out the hidden colours to the forefront. Mandeep teaches printmaking and bookmaking workshops and exhibits nationally and is a member of Leicester Print Workshop and Leicester Society of Artists.