ANU School of Art is running three workshops as part of the National Visual Art Education Conference held at the National Gallery of Australia - Making GIFS with Dr Lucien Leon, Experimenting with Inkjet Printing with Dr Rowan Conroy, and Primary Printmaking with Alison Alder.

The theme of the conference, ‘New directions: practice + innovation + learning’ will focus on a broad range of current issues in visual art education that are relevant to teachers of all levels of schooling as well as artists and educators from the museum and public gallery sectors.

Participants in Experimenting with Inkjet Printing will work in the ANU's Inkjet Research Facility (IRF) to explore recent developments in digital photography and inkjet printing technologies in UV cured printing. They will experiment with printing on different hard and soft substrates, such as glass, wood and textiles on the IRFs large-format UV cured flatbed printer, as well as using the conventional wide-format inkjet printer.

In Primary Printmaking, participants will learn two printmaking techniques: monotype, which produces strong designs from hand-worked hard surfaces, and pochoir, which produces strong bold colours from stencils. They will also see and discuss the international print exhibition 'Interchange' and reflect on their practice-led research and the work of their colleagues.

In Making GIFS, run by Dr Lucien Leon, participants will in the ANU's Animation and Video computer laboratory to learn about digital animation and video technologies. They will make their own work by sourcing, importing, editing and exporting a series of animated gifs for publication on a personal blog.