Planographic printing in school

The focus of this master’s thesis is the exploration of planographic printing techniques. In the theoretical part of the thesis, I presented two techniques of planographic printing – monotype and lithography. The focus of the monotype presentation was from the artistic-technical point of view since it is often used in schools as the main representative of the monographic printing. In the following part, I focused on the history and technology of lithography and some prominent artist, who created their artwork with this technique. I experimented with the planographic printing myself and created a series of graphics. As an alternative to the challenging process of lithography, I presented kitchen litho – a technique developed by the French artist Émilie Aizier in 2011 which is suitable for the school environment, due to its use of everyday materials. I aimed to thoroughly explore the technique itself and analyze the use of various materials and the possibilities it offers. I used the technique to create a series of graphics, as an examination of the reproductive possibility of the technique. Since my main point of focus was the application of lithography in primary schools, I transferred the technique itself and my knowledge of it to the school environment and with a group of students conducted a lesson, in which we created some graphics with the kitchen litho technique. My interest was to observe, whether the technique would be interesting enough and suitable to use in fine arts education, and whether the students of the 7th and 8th grade were capable of independently producing graphics in this technique. My assumption was that the technique is extremely interesting and suitable to use in schools, and should, therefore, garner a more detailed study, so that in their art education pupils could benefit from the experience of reproducible planographic printing – lithography. In this technique, I also created some artwork of my own that I present at the end of the thesis