Creating with Printing Materials

1969 translation of a 1968 German teaching guide. I find the credits confusingly Germanic, but here goes. Author is Lothar Kampmann, acknowledging work by students of the Ruhr Advanced Teachers' Training College, Dortmund Section. That acknowledgement apparently applies to a section illustrating techniques, some used in succession to create complex prints. The book also credits illustrations from other printed sources, along with a school in Trantenroth, Bochum (also the Ruhr), the Kothe-Marxmeier School (the source of at least some of the student work reproduced, it would seem).

When introducing a variety of techniques, authorial outlook is sometimes philosophical.

It starts with fingermarks
We see our children's first printing achievements on wallpaper and windowpanes, in magazines and books: their fingermarks. They are greasy or black with dirt Sometimes jam makes them coloured. They may be annoying to the housewife, but technically they are genuine poducts of printing. The young artist merely has to be guided on to the right lines.

Dirt and jam make way to colour. The little cups of the poster-paint box are ideal as the first inking pads. Since the tip of the thumb and the fingertips are of different sizes, we already have various sizes of block available for finger painting.

This is not by any means a technique only for infants' schools. Masters as eminent as Pablo Picasso have repeatedly made use of fingerprinting in lithography.

...

The whole hand, too is a suitable block. The print of a single hand can be extended with a print of the edge of the hand, the single whole fingers, or the fingertips. Or 'many hands' are used for printing.

Such handprints are known from the very early days of man. Neanderthal and Lascaux man used earth-coloured handprints in their cave paintings. One can rightly regard the fingerprint as the beginning of printing both for the individual and the human race.

In the sample work by students, ages range from nine to the teens. Some of this looks pretty sophisticated to me.

'Two Figures' (girl, 16). Paper print of patterns cut out of cartridge paper. Water colours.

Mostly, students observed their surroundings.

'In Port' (boy, 11). Grey-tone lino-cut.

'View of the Town through Scaffolding' (boy, 14). A lino-cut in which shape and white-line printing are combined.

'Industrial Landscape' (boy, 15). Two-colour roller print, brown and black block-printing ink.

'My Daddy is a Miner' (girl, 9). Print-through from a glass plate. All accidental features are reproduced.

Images suggests the region's heavy industry was still very evident in the 1960s. Now, notes wiki, Dortmund

...is known as Westphalia's "green metropolis". Nearly half the municipal territory consists of waterways, woodland, agriculture and green spaces with spacious parks... This stands in a stark contrast with nearly a hundred years of extensive coal mining and steel milling in the past.

Gritty though the area may have been at the time of this publication, that didn't stop the author from finding this merited a stern finger wag.

'Bicycles Outside the Playground' (boy, 14). Print-through monotype.
This is not how they should be left, blocking the entrance.

Industrial landscapes may have changed, but this 12-year old girl's lino-cut observes a scene that remains familiar (and pretty much universal).

'After a day's work, only Mummy has to carry on'