Linoleum Prints

For the project I made a series of linoleum prints conveying a message I wanted to present with my own voice. The subject of this is 3 linoleum prints, which have the words open doors, open borders, open mind in a doorway. The message of this is that the United States should have open borders and welcome refugees in who are searching for a safe haven to live in as they flee the war and disaster of their countries. In the first print I used marker to make the flags of countries from which immigrants come to the US on the door. In the second print I altered it using colored pencil to make the american flag in the door and the wall and I made a blue sky above it. The third print was made using purple ink. One element I used was color. I incorporated color by either adding it after printing or using a different colored ink. This enhanced the message of the art work and made it more interesting to look at. A principle of design I used was emphasis. I made sure to put emphasis on the words and the flags to make the message of my piece clear.

One composition rule I used in this piece was leading lines. The lines of the floorboards draw the viewer's eyes to the words, which enhances the picture and makes the message clearer. Another composition rule I used was formal balance. All of the prints were balanced, as the words were the same size and they were centered on the paper. This evolved because at first I planned on making the floorboards completely white but when I saw what it looked like when I like some bits of the linoleum on, I liked what I saw. They gave it a nice effect so the floorboards look like wood. Also I was only going to outline the letters in the second print but I ended up doing a lot more by adding a sky and the American flag in the background.

The meaning of this artwork is that we should allow immigrants into our country and keep our borders open. With the upcoming president, it looks like this won't be happening but I wanted to get a message out that we should keep an open mind about this topic. I have read many stories about refugees coming to the US and their stories are usually grim and full of loss until they get to the US. We should keep letting in refugees because they fleeing things worse than we can imagine. This relates to my life because I think this is an important thing to be brought up, and it is very relevant in political debate and on media and news. To make this stronger I would've added some color to the purple print. The most challenging part of this was making clean and full prints. Most of the time my prints would be splotchy and the color wouldn't be solid so I'd have to go back over it with watercolor. I'm most proud of how well I was able to convey my message in this piece. This shows my strengths and weaknesses as a learner because I was able to learn to do printing with linoleum blocks--something I haven't done in a while.