Intro to Paint and Ink Making with Dani Levine

2 Thursdays, 6 – 9pm
March 26 – April 2, 2026

Fee: $200 including materials and 6 hours of studio time

In this 6-hour hands-on workshop, students will learn to make their own (oil-based) printmaking inks from scratch! Participants will learn the basics of making their own paints, covering topics such as pigments, binders, fillers, and modifiers. This hands-on workshop is intended to give artists a more tactile relationship with their materials and mediums. By making our own inks, we can begin to explore nuanced ways to edit or modify recipes to better suit individual printmaking applications.

In the first session, students will learn introductory paint-making techniques by mixing and mulling inks with an array of provided dry pigments, oil-based binders, and mediums. Students will print with their own inks in the following session. Participants are welcome to bring pre-existing plates to test their inks. At the end of the workshop, each student can take a small jar of ink they made during the class.

Dani Levine is an artist and educator living in Astoria, NY. Mixing pigments, binders, and other found materials, her practice explores themes of chance, agency, and resilience—ideas that recur throughout her work. In her recent paintings, she draws on the queer-feminist aesthetics of 1960s and ’70s print culture, layering lesbian iconography with invented symbols to traverse time through image, material, and genre alike. She has taught and developed painting material workshops for schools such as Princeton, Boston University, Pratt Institute, and Swarthmore College. Through teaching, she engages artists’ materials as a means to build specificity, context, and agency within artists’ work. Her approach aims to open broader conversations about color as material—connecting its historical and contemporary uses, as well as its alchemic properties, to visual traditions, cultural references, and personal narratives.

Levine received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Select honors include exhibitions at Provincetown Arts Association Museum, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, My Pet Ram, The Alfred Museum, SOLOWAY, and The Abrons Arts Center. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, and a Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder in New York, NY. She currently teaches at Yale and Princeton University.