Inside CasaPlan: A Printmaking Workshop in Valparaiso After a Street Art Tour

Valparaiso is a city where you constantly look up. Walls, staircases, doors, corners of buildings — everything seems covered with paint. If you come here for street art in Valparaiso (and most people do), it’s easy to spend the whole day walking around murals and feel like you’ve understood the city.
That morning, we did exactly that during our Valparaiso city tour. We walked, looked, took photos, and kept noticing the same thing: Valparaiso never really covers the old layer to make things neat. It simply adds another one on top. Posters, drips of paint, textures — everything remains visible.
But sometimes, after Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción, we felt like slowing the pace. Not another mural, not another viewpoint, but a place where the artistic life of the city continues quietly, away from the street. That is how we ended up at CasaPlan.

CasaPlan is located in El Plan, the historic center of Valparaiso, in a building constructed in 1917. The building was restored by the founders of the project, artist and printmaker Javiera Moreira and architect Antonia Jarpa.
This part of the city is part of the historic quarter of Valparaiso, which is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The address is Avenida Brasil 1490. It’s a central area — the city is busy outside — but once you step inside, everything becomes quieter.
The project itself didn’t appear by accident. According to CasaPlan’s own materials, the founders arrived in Valparaiso in 2015, discovered the 1917 building, restored it, and opened CasaPlan to the local community in August 2015.

The simplest way to describe CasaPlan is this: it is an active printmaking workshop in Valparaiso (grabado) and contemporary art space with an exhibition area and a café.
Their workshop program includes serious disciplines such as:

• aguafuerte (etching)
• aguatinta (aquatint)
• punta seca (drypoint)
• colagrafía (collagraph)
• monotype printing

People come here to learn these techniques systematically.
We generally avoid including places in our programs unless we have personally experienced them. You can read about a printmaking workshop in Valparaiso, but it’s hard to understand what it really feels like until you try it. So we signed up for a workshop ourselves.
Among the techniques available for beginners, we chose monotype printing - probably the most accessible entry point into printmaking, but still a real printmaking process involving ink and a press.
To be honest, we thought it would be as simple as paint and a brush.
But the process turned out to be much more interesting.

The work begins with a transparent, rigid plate - roughly the size of an A4 sheet. The image is created on this plate and then transferred onto paper.
What surprised us most was how many tools are involved: different types of rollers, scrapers, hard palette knives. Thin sticks are used to scratch lines through the ink.
Instead of simply adding color, you often remove it, exposing lighter areas underneath. Very quickly, you realize that the work is less about color and more about texture.
The workshop is led by a practicing artist. He guides the process quietly — suggesting where to stop, where to add more, and where to remove something.
He also demonstrated techniques that are difficult to imagine if you’ve never worked with traditional printmaking techniques.
For example, lightly spraying solvent (they use gasoline in a spray bottle) creates a soft, blurred effect. Linseed oil changes the viscosity of the ink, making the layer more transparent. Sometimes the ink is blotted with a cloth, sometimes spread out, sometimes partially dried.
These are small technical gestures, but they completely change the result.

The most memorable moment comes after the image is finished.
The plate is placed on the press bed. A sheet of prepared paper is carefully laid on top. Then the press rolls everything through, you lift the paper, and suddenly the image appears.
It is almost always slightly different from what you saw on the plate. Lines become sharper, textures deeper. Sometimes the most interesting part of the print is the area you didn’t even notice before.

The most memorable moment comes after the image is finished.
The plate is placed on the press bed. A sheet of prepared paper is carefully laid on top. Then the press rolls everything through, you lift the paper, and suddenly the image appears.
It is almost always slightly different from what you saw on the plate. Lines become sharper, textures deeper. Sometimes the most interesting part of the print is the area you didn’t even notice before.
During the workshop, you usually have time to create 2 or 3 prints.The first one is cautious, the second becomes more confident, by the third, you begin to work more freely.
Sometimes there is also enough ink left to make a softer second impression — a ghost print. It’s lighter and often feels like a completely separate artwork.
It’s interesting to observe how quickly the initial hesitation disappears. Even people who start by saying “I can’t draw” gradually relax and begin to enjoy the process.

Street art in Valparaiso is built on layers — paint over paint, textures, traces of time.
Monotype printing works in layers as well: applying ink, removing it, transferring it, sometimes printing again. That’s why the transition from walking through street art in Valparaiso to joining a printmaking workshop feels surprisingly natural.
If you find yourself in Valparaiso, Chile, don’t miss CasaPlan. It can easily be included in a Valparaiso shore excursion, during a cruise stop in Valparaiso port, or as part of a day trip from Santiago to Valparaiso.
And if you’d like to spend a day in Valparaiso with us — exploring the street art of Valparaiso and then joining a workshop at CasaPlan — you can find the details here: Valparaiso Shore Excursion: Street Art & Monotype Printing Experiences