- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(gentle music) - [Dalia] Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by the Community Foundation Tampa Bay.

(gentle upbeat music) In this edition of WEDU Arts Plus an author and illustrator inspires kids to be creative and confident.

- They get a chance to see the journey of what it looks like to believe in yourself and to have a craft and work at it.

And they get a chance to see how you progressively get better, if you don't give up.

- [Dalia] A established printmaking studio.

- [Vanessa] You don't really know what you're gonna get until you lift that paper up for the first time.

It's a magical moment, it's really fun.

- [Dalia] Fine art, printing and reproduction.

- There is a trust level and a kind of a bond that happens when an artist brings something to me.

- [Dalia] And the artistry of a ship that has sailed the world.

- [Sailor] One of the impacting things about Wavertree about seeing her is just walking down to the pier and seeing the majesty of her tall masts and the rigging that's necessary to make a ship like that work.

- It's all coming up next on WEDU Arts Plus.

(jazzy upbeat music) Hello, I'm Dalia Colon and this is WEDU Arts Plus.

Calvin Reynolds has a special message for his readers.

Believe in yourself.

This Tampa resident shares his artistic journey with young audiences hoping to inspire them to follow their dreams.

In this segment discover how Calvin followed his childhood passion to become a professional illustrator and children's author.

(gentle inspiring music) - The development of my character Jayce came about from coming home, just kind of seeing how my kids struggles in school were kind of lining up with my struggles in corporate and in my professional life.

And not just that but you know just seeing that correlation between kids and adults and we kind of share the same stories.

Jayce really just came about from just being creative and wanting to find something that is kind of always defining the odds.

So Jayce is a bee.

What other character can you use that can be the staple of believing in yourself.

And so the whole development process about Jayce came about with just going back to my sketching, R&D, things of that nature.

'Cause I wanted to create something special that we can all connect to that was fun and that could just, touch people in a different way.

(gentle inspiring music continues) - Calvin's artwork, his style is so unique, it's so different and usually when people see it, they're like they know it's a Calvin Reynolds original.

Which I love, 'cause he really has such a dynamic and unique style.

His illustrations literally jump off the pages and that's what I love the most about it is that it's so lifelike and people can see themselves in the characters.

(gentle inspiring music continues) - Again, I was like in elementary school, right?

Elementary school.

Any of you guys remember this guy?

Remember me showing you my illustrations from when I was a kid?

- [Children] Yeah, red ninja.

- Red Ninja, yep.

And so my love for drawing and writing never stopped.

And so now I'm producing artwork and stories such as "Harold's Big Dreams" and "Jayce the Bee" Series.

- His artwork really inspired them to realize, "Oh everything is possible."

Start here wherever it is that you are, third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade start right there.

And just know that whatever you're doing if you have that big dream, you can get there.

So that was also really cool that he was able to share with them "Like, this is my actual fifth grade stuff.

This the same age as you all are."

- So you can see my love of comic books, Saturday morning cartoons.

It was just a good way to stay creative.

Well for me it started when I was in like third grade and I would just draw and it got to a point where I wanted to just create my own stories and my own comic book characters.

And then when I was in high school, I had this cartoon character that I created called The Red Ninja.

And it was my art teacher, Mrs. Boring, who took me on a college trip to Sarasota, Ringling College of Art and Design, and that changed my life.

When I went to visit that school I just had that feeling like this is where I wanted to be.

And it was my guidance counselor and my parents' support.

I ended up getting accepted into Ringling, and that was where the journey started.

I had this love for sports.

I was on the high school basketball team and I wanted to try to find a way to combine sports with art and fashion.

And I was fortunate enough to land a job over in Bradenton, illustrating famous athletes such as Kobe Bryant, a lot of those great athletes from the late nineties, 2000 era.

But you know, after 25 years of doing anything you kind of want to try to find other aspects of art.

And so I wanted to create something that I felt like could resonate with everyone.

(inspiring music) Children's books are the cornerstone to literature.

And so I think when I go into these schools and they get a chance to see me, and I can connect with these kids and they see the art and I get a chance to show them books that I created when I was in elementary school, middle school I get a chance to show them projects that I worked on on when I was in high school.

They get a chance to see the journey of what it looks like to believe in yourself and to have a craft and work at it.

And they get a chance to see how you progressively get better if you don't give up.

And so the teachers love that message.

It's a great way to connect.

I give my presentation and afterwards I have kids come up to me and say, how did you do this?

And they ask very interesting questions.

They're engaged and so I guess they see a little bit of me in them and vice versa.

(inspiring music continues) - I think like Calvin is a great artist and I and inspire me like to keep going with my art too.

- Well he said to like always follow your dreams to never stop until you get what you went for.

- I used to draw like stick mans now I wish I could be like a artist and make my own company.

- "Jayce the Bee" is like inspire me, like to keep going.

- I was in the fifth grade that love- - Calvin has just been amazing to come out here and be such an approachable voice.

Our kids many times don't feel like they're represented and he is the person that looks like them, that acts like them, that's doing what they want to do.

So he's able to show them if he can do it, they can do it.

And I just love that positive message because our students need and deserve to realize that anything is possible.

- There's a art form to writing children's books.

You can't write that many words.

You can't have that many words.

So it was a process of learning how to say more with less.

And that's powerful.

- He's truly a dynamic boy, he's a dynamic illustrator, and really knows how to touch the hearts of children.

- I wanted Jayce to inject positivity into the world.

Like I wanted it to be more of a, this is my legacy and this is my way of making the world a better place.

And so Jayce is an acronym for just accepting yourself changes everything.

And so just Jayce's name is something that I think we can all resonate with.

We're all faced with difficulties.

Sometimes with, you may be stepping into a area that you're not comfortable with, and it's just about believing that you can step outta your comfort zone and follow your dreams.

(inspiring music continues) - Learn more about Calvin Reynold's work at jaycethebee.com.

Since 1979 Tiger Lilly Press has been providing a space for individuals to find out more about printmaking.

From silk screen to etching to letter press all aspects of the artistic process are explored.

- Tiger Lily Press is a group of volunteer print makers and I wanna stress the volunteer because we've been around for 40 years and we've maintained the fine art of printmaking for all those years with the volunteer group.

We're located at the Dunham Recreation Center in Cincinnati and we've been here since 2001, and they've been very generous to us, and the campus is beautiful.

The mission of Tiger Lily Press is to promote, to preserve and to print fine art hand pulled prints.

We're unique in that way in that we're, we're preserving this old art.

Our classes are taught by our members.

So we have silk screen, we have collagraph, we have etching, we have relief printings, we have letter press classes, so people can take a class and come in and print and learn.

And if you really enjoy it then you can become a member and learn more.

- I would highly recommend it if you have any interest in printmaking to take a class.

I think people often think that they have to know how to draw or they have to be an artist to take a class.

But that's the beauty of printmaking is that you can have no drawing ability and you can still make incredible work.

One thing that's really nice is that printmaking is a varied art.

There are a lot of different ways to go about printmaking.

I think it's a great way for people to figure out what they like and I think there's probably some form of printmaking for everybody.

- I first became aware of Tiger Lily Press when I was in graduate school at DAAP.

I was first drawn to the organization by just the love of printmaking and knowing that there were common minded people that enjoyed the same thing.

I think what sets Tiger Lily apart from other printmaking studios is that it is a fine art printmaking studio.

You can go to another printmaking studios and maybe do silk screen, but you'd have to go to another institution to maybe learn intaglio, and then another institution to maybe learn relief.

Well, here at Tiger Lilly we have all aspects of printmaking.

Not only do we have classes here that you can sign up and take a part in but we've done outreach classes to local communities and high schools that might have a smaller arts department or arts funding.

So we, I think we fulfill our mission that way by trying to bring printmaking out to the wider audience.

One thing that really helps Tiger Lily be an integral part of the community and something that I think in general is lacking.

When you're an artist and you get out of school, places like this I think are very integral in that transition period.

You can come here and work in our studio and have access to the presses.

Here at Tiger Lily, we do the working artist program and it basically lasts a year and there's a little bit of a money stipend to it but it's mostly about having complete and utter access to the facilities.

And the working artist program for me it was a really nice way to dive deep back into printmaking.

It really helps to give you that dedicated and supported time to explore your work.

- Almost all the inspiration for my work comes from my walks.

I take photos when I'm out and usually it's of a weed or a plant and so I usually work from a photograph that I've taken and I'll blow the photograph up pretty big, 'cause I like to work large.

And then I usually do a pencil drawing from my big photo.

Once I've done a giant pencil drawing, I transfer it to my plate and then once I have the image transferred to the plate I start carving and the carving can take me anywhere from two weeks to six weeks.

And then once I have it carved, I print.

I remember when I would pull the print up for the first time, like for the very first time, even though it wasn't a perfect print, I was like, I love this.

It's kind of a magical moment that only really happens in print making because it's a surprise.

You don't really know what you're gonna get until you lift that paper up for the first time.

It's a magical moment, it's really fun.

- We're having our 40th anniversary show at Kennedy Heights Art Center.

We will show our history in a timeline, so that you can see when we began with some of the portfolios that were developed over time.

And we also have what we call a working artist program.

So we'll have those artists work on a wall, and then the other rooms will be filled with the current members artwork.

- Tiger Lily has been here for 40 years which is credit to them.

That's a long time to be a volunteer ran organization.

- Tiger Lily has been such a great influence on me.

There's such a community at Tiger Lily Press when I first started I had so many questions, how do I clean my instruments when I'm done?

What's the best paper to use?

I just had a million questions and there's such a community here of people who I can ask.

- It's amazing to watch people in classes when they actually pull up their first print.

I mean the look on their face is amazing.

Gives you chills just even to think about it.

- I think by taking classes, people are able to find out how to go through the process of making art and just finding what makes you happy.

I think everybody has some kind of talent and we just have to find it.

- Tiger Lilly's one of those little hidden gems.

And I think right now as we're transferring out of that into like a 501c3 and being more public.

Our role is only gonna increase in Cincinnati and how we help the community at large.

I think in general, if you kind of look at your arts community as like a tapestry, right?

And the more design and the more detail, the more color the more interesting it is to look at.

Arts institutions are integral to the community.

Just to expand what we see as beauty and to bring maybe disparate groups together that necessarily wouldn't meet and hang out.

You know, art does that sometimes, like we're all here to make a print, but you know, in essence we're getting to learn about each other and being that community.

(gentle music) - For more information head to tigerlillypress.org.

Pixels & Ink is a print shop in Reno, Nevada dedicated to art reproduction.

Up next we get an inside look at the technical and artistic process.

(gentle upbeat music) - My name's Hunter Howitt, I'm the owner of Pixels & Ink.

And we cater to photographers and artists for their fine artwork and everything that helps the artist along in their adventure.

At the heart of it, it is an art reproduction facility.

(gentle upbeat music continues) Art reproduction is the process of reproducing an original artwork, whether it's photograph or a painting, whether on paper canvas, et cetera.

As far as photographers go, an image will live on a computer forever, but printing is one of the most important things for a photographer to get it out there in the world.

So my job really is to capture an artist's work and reproduce it in the best way possible.

Will shine back, and so when we, when we reproduce your.

Being able to see color and translate it digitally, mechanically and kind of engineer a final product I'm bringing a lot of elements together and I do see myself as a technician often, but I think there is an art to not only reproducing the color and getting it right but also in working with our clientele.

I think the whole thing's kind of a dance.

So I could see some artwork in there.

To be able to keep this relief through here.

When they drop an original off, they're dropping off their baby.

A lot of 'em say, this is my baby, take care of it.

And they've spent hours, days, months, years on this piece.

And so there is a trust level and a kind of a bond that happens when an artist brings something to me and it's, it's tepid at first often, because you're just getting to know each other.

But usually after the first round of reproducing artwork or even just imaging it, we're friends for life.

(gentle upbeat music continues) - I've been working with Hunter for about five years and it was really important for me to find a good photographer.

When an artist does a painting and if they sell their painting, it's gone.

The collector might put it in their home and no one ever sees it again.

And so I felt it was really important for me to not only archive my work for myself, but also as an artist you know, we have to make a living.

And in many cases if I have a popular painting that I've done, I can generate more money by selling the reproduction, photo prints, giclées, than I did ever on the original.

(upbeat music) - Giclée is a French term.

It's a spurting of ink on canvas.

That's what everyone has come to know as a giclée is canvas.

But in the process of art reproduction, everything we print with pigment prints on our absence, et cetera technically everything is a giclée.

There're kind of two schools of thought in the art world.

One would be for a painting for instance.

Some artists like to only sell their originals, and then the other artists may want to sell prints of their originals or have their painting image so that they can put it on greeting cards and that kind of thing.

Art reproduction and the process of giclées has a large impact on the art world because it's giving access to artwork where before you weren't able to maybe attain an original you can now bring art into your home at a much more affordable price.

And so that's a really great way that art reproduction has come into the fold.

(upbeat music continues) - I feel that art should be accessible.

People come to me and they so appreciate that they can afford what I have to share with them.

And I think it's all right for an artist to decide that that's not their way of operating, but for many of us it is.

And it's wonderful that we have this technology that we can take advantage of.

(upbeat music continues) (gentle music) - Discover more at pixelsandink.us.

In this segment head to the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City to see Wavertree the flagship of the museum's fleet.

Recently restored, get an inside look at the 1885 Globe trotting cargo ship, and learn about her history and remarkable architecture.

- The South Street Seaport Museum is a 50 year old institution that exists in the original Port of New York.

It is located in the buildings and adjacent to the piers and with a fleet of ships that are representative of the original Port of New York.

So New York was a port before it was a city.

For us, place really matters.

Where we are doing our work is in actually the original counting houses that are the first World Trade Center of the City of New York.

The shipping piers and the ships and their connection to the rest of the world is what built New York.

So we really tell the first chapter of the story of modern New York.

The street of ships is a term that's used to describe South Street really from the Battery up to Brooklyn Bridge and beyond.

The image of the street of ships is that of the bowsprits, the head rig, the spar that comes off the bow of the ship, meeting with the city, hanging over the buildings that are are there.

It is that connection between waterborne transportation and the growing metropolis that represents really the birthplace of New York as we know it.

These ships were in the 19th century, the engines of trade, they were bringing raw materials in and manufactured goods out, but they were also instruments of globalization.

They were instruments of connection.

They were the instruments of the migration of peoples of cultural exchange.

(gentle piano music) Wavertree is our flagship.

She is an 1885 iron sailing ship.

Many people would refer to her as a tall ship so a big tall, masted square rig sailing ship.

And she is for us, the connection between New York and the rest of the world.

So she was a globe trotter.

She was a, what's called a tramp for most of her life.

So a tramp was the name for a ship that would carry any cargo anywhere in the world as long as it paid.

On the day that Wavertree was launched in Southampton, England in 1885.

She was a profoundly normal ship, no more special than a Mack Truck or a freight car today.

But she is the last surviving ship of her type in the world.

She has outlasted all of her sisters.

She did so actually because of what I think you could call a series of happy accidents, which might not have seemed happy at at all at the time.

In 1910 during her second attempt to try to round Cape Horn, the Cape at the southern end of South America and probably the most violent and dangerous body of water in the world.

She was dismasted, which means that her tall sailing rig came falling down to the deck iron and wood and steel and cable and cordage and canvas all came crashing down destroying the ship's ability to sail.

Remarkably killing no one.

And she was declared by her owners a functional loss.

She was converted first to a floating warehouse.

She was then converted by having her decks cut out into a sand barge.

She was found by the South Street Seaport Museum.

And so in 1970, she came here to great fanfare and she has been lovingly preserved by volunteers and staff of the museum ever since.

Wavertree just completed in 2016 a completely unprecedented restoration project.

Funded by the city of New York, a 16 month $13 million restoration that brought her really as close to sailing condition as she has been since she was dismasted in 1910.

Life on a sailing ship in the 19th century was a pretty grim business.

So let's first think about, what's the function of these ships.

The job is to get a small pile of coal, a couple thousand tons of coal, or it's equivalent halfway around the world or die trying, right?

So the inversion of importance of money and human life between the 19th century and now can't be overstated.

Crews were expendable, sailors were expendable cargos and ships were not.

It was a rigid class hierarchy.

You can see a really stark example of that.

In the cabin door that leads to the Captain's Saloon.

Inside the Captain's Saloon.

She's a Victorian ship, so posh, you know cushions and nice chairs and a pump organ and a settee and a tea service made of silver and so on.

On that side of the door, it's brightly finished with varnish and nice panels.

On the other side of the door painted white, utilitarian, work-a-day.

(upbeat classical music) And so too was the lifestyle.

Aboard the ship, the captain enjoyed a pretty comfortable existence.

The sailors lived forward toward the bow of the ship and lived many men to a small cramped thing sleeping perhaps on a straw mattress eating salted meat out of wooden barrels.

One of the impacting things about Wavertree, about seeing her is just walking down to the pier and seeing the majesty of her tall masts and the rigging that's necessary to make a ship like that work.

But the real gem is to get into Wavertree and go down into the hold space which is open this year for the first time ever, and be able to take in the size and the scale of a huge cargo sailing ship from the 19th century.

It's like being inside the belly of a whale or in a cathedral.

At one turn, incredibly beautiful and the construction is breathtaking.

And yet its function was to do a very mundane and dirty job.

And this is where I would say that Wavertree is truly unique.

There is not another ship in the world that has a space inside like the one that Wavertree has.

She isn't the ship that built New York, but she is of the class of ship that made New York what it is.

And so for us, particularly as the last of her type she represents New York's connection to the rest of the world.

That in the 19th century from an east river pier you could get on a ship like Wavertree, you could go out the narrows, turn left, go right, go straight and end up anywhere in the world.

(upbeat classical music) (upbeat music) - For more about Wavertree visit southstreetseaportmuseum.org.

And that wraps it up for this edition of WEDU Arts Plus.

For more arts and culture, visit wedu.org/artsplus.

Until next time, I'm Dalia Colon, thanks for watching.

(intense upbeat music) Funding for WEDU Arts Plus is provided by the Community Foundation, Tampa Bay.

(inspiring music)