Students in RISD Studio Re-Create Historical Wallpaper-Making Materials and Techniques

“Prussian blue is such a troublesome color,” says Printmaking Professor Andrew Raftery as he mixes water, gelatin and pigment and gets ready to strain the concoction through a piece of cheese cloth. Grad student Yiyi Wang MFA 25 PR, who is mixing up a batch of Venetian pink nearby, notes that these historically accurate paints are sensitive to temperature and will dry much lighter than they appear when wet.

Down the hill from Benson Hall, the other students in Raftery’s spring Printmaking class, Printed Walls: Wallpaper Design, Technique and History, are working with the 18th-century colors in the Chace Center’s Common Room. The course was developed in collaboration with the RISD Museum, and members of the public have been invited to watch as they prepare to create long strips of wallpaper inspired by the ongoing exhibition The Art of French Wallpaper Design. Over the course of the semester, each student will design and create a repeating border pattern as well as a larger design on a roll of heavy paper, and samples of the completed wallpapers will be installed around campus.

The RISD Museum collaborated with Adelphi Paper Hangings in upstate New York to reproduce one of the original French designs featured in the exhibition. Adelphi is one of the only US companies still printing by hand using woodblocks and a 19th-century style printing bench, and Raftery’s class is attempting to re-create the historical process. They’re even using an old woodblock printing press Adelphi donated to RISD, which Raftery and local carpenter Lynn Clapham brought back to working condition earlier this year.

“You can’t entirely re-create the past, though,” Raftery says with a smile. “We are using the old printer and original paint recipes and we plan to hang the student papers with wheat starch as they did in the past, but they didn’t have Crockpots back then, and we need them to heat up the gelatin. The students’ design ideas are really contemporary, too.”

At this point in the semester, the students are still finalizing their designs and hand-carving them into blocks of poplar. “You have to carve really deep because the paint we are mixing is thicker than standard inks,” says grad student Sage Leafsong MDes 25, who is working on a pattern that incorporates spring tulips. “I started the process by sketching, then transferred the design onto a clear sheet of acetate that I glued to the block as a guide for the carving.”

Sophomore Bella Brown 27 PR steps away from her design in order to answer questions posed by visitors to the museum. “We’re creating long strips of sturdy paper that won’t discolor over time,” she explains, “and mixing the background colors today. When our woodblocks are completed, we’ll print over these colors in different, lighter colors.”

Brown’s kinetic design features horses in full gallop and was inspired, she says, by visits to the special collections libraries at RISD and Brown. She describes the carving process as “tedious but also kind of relaxing.”