With Valentine’s Day on the way, students won’t have to leave campus to find a unique way to impress their crush.
The University Print Club will host its first Valentine’s Day card sale today and Friday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in Free Speech Plaza.
The nearly 30-member club is compiling clever, sincere and visually imaginative $3 cards. Ella Desmond, printmaking senior and Print Club vice president, said the sale is run by club members who make cards using their own materials.
Katherine Santana, printmaking junior and club member, said the club is attempting to reach out to students and demonstrate the distinctive appeal of print art.
Printmaking is the process of transferring a picture onto multiple pieces of paper using an image etched on other materials like copper, marble, stone or wood, Desmond and Santana explained.
Desmond said an event like the Valentine’s Day sale can expose the nature of printmaking while funding the club.
“Students who aren’t involved with art can have exposure to something unique or unusual,” Desmond said. “Most people have no idea [what printmaking is].”
Chance Taylor, Print Club president and printmaking senior, said the work required to create an image on material and print it on paper separates printmaking from other artistic endeavors.
“It’s a very hands-on process that’s more personal,” he said. “I like working with my hands and creating something — building an image up.”
Transferring an image using different materials leaves unique but subtle characteristics on a page, which can only be found in printmaking, Desmond said.
The work and production in printmaking fosters communication with its ability to be mass produced and spread to others, as well as the teamwork often inherent in the medium, Desmond said. Everyone in the print studio works on projects simultaneously while sharing the same equipment and often helping each other.
“It’s the earliest form of mass communication,” Santana said.
Despite printmaking’s old age, the medium constantly changes with quickly developing technologies, which Santana said makes possibilities endless. But this doesn’t change the traditional procedures of printmaking.
“These processes are so old, but people are still using them because they’re so beautiful,” Desmond said. 
Desmond said the club has been active this year. The Print Club often holds sales along with the Ceramic Club and found its way to the Louisiana Book Festival and another print art sale in New Orleans. Club members also improved their Facebook page, posting art and promoting their events.
But because the Valentine’s Day sale is a voluntary event for Print Club members, half the funds will go to students who worked the sale, and the other half will go to the club itself, Taylor said.
This will mark the club’s first themed sale, when members will all print a similar subject matter.
 
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Contact Austen Krantz at [email protected]