Find Your Voice

The goal of this project was to convey a message important to you using prints. The materials for this project were a linoleum block, ink, and whatever medium you used to hand-manipulate your prints. I knew right away I wanted to do something with sexual assault. 1 in 6 women in America has been a victim of attempted rape or rape. And it’s not just women as 1 in 10 rape victims are male. For my project I wrote the words “DON’T GET RAPED”, underneath I put images of the symbol for male, a martini glass, and a bra, underneath that I put the words “Rape is never the victim’s fault”. Instead of teaching people to not get raped, people need to be taught not to rape. Often when women say they’ve been raped questions arise such as “well, what were you wearing?” which doesn’t matter and it implies that that it is the women’s fault because she was dressed provocatively. And I think that male rape victims do not get as much attention as female rape victims so I wanted to stress that men can get raped too. It also doesn’t matter if the victim was drinking because rape is rape. Non-consensual sex is not sex, it’s rape. RAINN

To begin, I used Pages to type the text and place the images I found on the internet. I chose to type the words and find the images because I wanted my print to be very clean and precise. After printing out the images I traced the text and images with a soft pencil. I then placed it front-side down on my linoleum block and rubbed the soft pencil across the paper. My design had rubbed off on the linoleum backwards. It was backwards but when I printed it would be the right way (because it’s a stamp). I then decided I didn’t want the text to be the negative space. So I chose to carve out the negative space. This took some time and focus when carving around the letters.

Onto the printing. I first used a piece of paper that was the same size paper I was going to use to print, and created a 3 inch border, and put my linoleum block inside the border. This helped me line up my paper so my design was in the middle. I used a pallet knife to spread some ink onto a metal plate, and used a brayer to spread the ink out until it sounded sticky. I rolled the ink onto the linoleum block. I then quickly grabbed a piece of paper and used a damp paper towel to wet the paper (it helps the ink stick better). I then lined up the damp paper with the paper I had put a border around. I then rubbed the paper to get the ink to stick and used a printing pin to press down harder to further transfer the image. I then pulled the paper up to reveal my first print. Because I had shifted the paper to line it up, my design came out blurred. I later decided to play off this idea of date rape drugs. I ended up doing 18 prints.

I came up with three final prints. One was a perfect print with black ink on white paper. I used printing ink to go back and fill the splotchy areas. On another one, I used watercolor to create shapes the resembled date rape drugs. I used black ink to print on top of the background, I did not touch that print after I printed it. For my last one, I used a print with blurry text and images. I outlined the words “DON’T RAPE” in red sharpie to get the message across. I chose red because it contrasts with the black.

Overall, I am so happy with my prints. I put a lot of effort into this project and I think my work reflects that.

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence