The canvas bag printing event proved to be an amazing outlet to destress for me. As we worked with the ink and allowed ourselves to get messy I felt the accumulated stress of the entire week slowly seep away. When deciding what to design on my canvas tote I had a number of ideas; however, what stood out me the most was the semicolon symbol. I think this was in part because I am pursuing an English minor and have an appreciation for the semicolon when I just can’t decide where the comma belongs, and also in part for the message it sends. When writing, the author can easily end their sentence but chooses not to. The author is you and the sentence is one’s life according to Amy Bleuel, founder of Project Semicolon. It is used to acknowledge those suffering from depression and even stands for suicide prevention. It is a thoughtful and beautiful message that is not only about affirmation but about solidarity against mental health issues, including depression and suicide.

The canvas bag-making event was really fun. I drew a blue person on my bag. I’m really glad the event was offered, because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to gather the materials needed for canvas bag printing.

The only downside to the event is that my artistic skills were slightly lacking, so the person I drew on my bag looks slightly/extremely scary in dimly lit light. Sometimes when I get up at night, I wonder if it’s always smiling because it’s thinking about when it’ll eat my soul.

I really loved this event. Not only did I get to try out a medium that I had never worked with, I got to go home with something I had made. When I was first thinking about my design, I thought of doing autumn leaves, with many shades of orange and gold and red. However, I ended up thinking that I might be being too ambitious in my design, and then thought of just drawing whatever creature I thought of. I was nervous when I was printing it, since I couldn’t tell at all if I had put too little or too much ink and tried to very thorough when printing. When I took the printing screen off and saw that it had printed cleanly and solidly, I was so relieved and happy! I’m super glad I got to attend this event and take a break from studying.

I came to the workshop thinking we would paint with paintbrushes on bags and get messy, but I came out learning a new painting technique. As we viewed the art style of Andy Warhol’s screen prints in the Johnson Museum of Art, I was inspired and amazed how paint can be layered flat so beautifully. When I saw the demonstration done by the instructor, the fading element gave me an idea to use rain as it fades into the ground. I made this design as a symbol to demonstrate a safe place for myself as I venture outside of my comfort zone. I have never been proud of my artistic skills, but I am really happy with how the design turned out.

When I started to write about it I have already been using this canvas bag for more than a week. I love it. It’s a manifestation of my major and research topic, but overall it’s good design as well (oh seems that I’m bragging…sorry about that but I really do love it!)

It also taught me things along the way of course. One of them is the good old perseverance lesson. I tried twice in my trial print and wasn’t very satisfied. I tried again on the real canvas bag which ended up in a mess. I then decided to try on the other side of the bag one more time–this time it was gorgeous.

But perseverance should not be blind. A very important lesson I learnt is that throughout the process you should go and look at other people who are doing really well and just ask them how they did it. Previously I had always been really shy (no matter it’s homework or hobbies) and had in general preferred always asking the instructor instead of my peers, because I secretly feared that my peers would have less patience in me and that I would just walk away more puzzled or even rejected. But this time during printing, I saw a girl who did really stunning work (Sorry that I didn’t ask your name–I’ll find you next time!), so I went up and asked her, getting really nice advice which actually helped a lot in producing my own bag. So it’s decided: even in studies and research–don’t just assume that my peers have no time and I’ll turn to the instructors instead: any peer that does better than me can be my instructor and it’s just a matter of summing up courage and ask! Just don’t be too shy anymore 😉

It is my first time to paint a canvas bag. I really like this event. I learned how to make a bag by using wooden frame and colors. It is not as easy as it seems. I enjoy it ! I and my friends also worked together to make the best bags. I love it !

Had an amazing time at the Johnson Museum learning about screen printing and practicing screen printing.

We first sketched our ideas with pencil on to scratch paper:

Then we sketched and cut our design on to sticker paper. I decided on doing my name spelt in Urdu:

Then we put the design sticker we had created on to a screen-printing canvas:

My design was all ready to be screen-printed on to my canvas bag. But there was one important thing to do left. I had to choose a color…

I ended up choosing blue. We first did a practice run on a handkerchief….

Now it was time for the screen-print on the tote bag…

I loved going to the Johnson Museum and detaching myself from my academics and exploring my creative side. Thank you to GRF Magdala for coordinating this event!

I already had two tote bags in my dorm, but I thought that another one couldn’t hurt. I was also really excited to be able to screen print my own design on it. Before we got started, we were shown a screen print of Trump by Deborah Kass. It was hung beside Andy Warhol’s Vote McGovern. I thought it was really interesting how she used this specific piece and Andy Warhol’s style to deliver a political message.

For the design of my print, I wanted to keep it simple since this was my first time making a screen print. I decided to use the initials of my name and print it twice with the top layer darker than the bottom layer to give it depth. Although the print didn’t come out as clean as I’d imagined it to, I think I like it more that way. It adds character™ to my bag. It was nice to remember that nothing has to be perfect in art and sometimes mistakes can turn out to be pleasant. Magdala reminded us that Rose Scholars events like these takes us out of our monotonous schedules and allow us to be creative. Here, we are so often defined by our major and what we study that it gets hard to do something else outside that world. I think the Johnson Museum events have been some of my favorite Rose Scholars events so far.

I have a ton of tote bags, so when I discovered an opportunity to design my own canvas bag, I jumped at the chance.  I’m ashamed to say that I’ve never been to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum the past two years I’ve been in Ithaca, but I’m glad I went today.

One of the museum coordinators, Annmarie was such a lovely and patient teacher; she let us dip our toes into screen printing by showing some examples by artists around the museum and later letting us have a try.  I love how she encouraged us to step outside our comfort zone and play around with whatever ideas we had.  When creating the stencils, I had an image in mind, but I eventually switched over to a much simpler shape, the beloved triangle.  Magdala asked for the meaning behind our art, and honestly I just really like triangles.  However, if I were to put some deep meaning to it, I guess it’d be about how I love watching and reading about conspiracy theories (especially murder cases) and how the triangles symbolize the illuminati.  Also, the two outer fading triangles was never part of the plan, but I enjoyed experimenting it looked kind of cool.

It was extremely satisfying to press the ink onto the canvas bag and peel away the screen to reveal the resulting image.  I love how this experience gave me a break from all the problem sets and prelims coming up.  It was nice just to focus my attention on something else and tickling my creative side.

In today’s canvas bag printing, I went in not having any idea what we were going to do. Printing made me immediately think that we would be doing something digital but this was not the case. We actually used a screen and squeegee to put our designs onto canvas bags. Not sure how my design would turn out, I decided to go with something simple and printed my initials onto the bag. I thought that this would be a short process (cutting out the design and painting it on) but getting my two letters on the bag actually took the full hour and a half! In addition, the paint was quite hard to get on – you could not apply to much pressure or else the paint would rub off. It took a couple tries before I could get my letters on and even then, it did not come out as opaque as I would have liked it to. However, it was still incredibly fun trying out this process and the look of the slightly faded letters on the canvas bag is growing on me. All in all, I loved being in the museum and directing my energy away from schoolwork and classes and into my artwork!