Monoprinting

 Tonight I was doing some monoprinting. This process is one of my favourites as its quite quick and produces different results. I like to mix it with other media's like fabric or metals etc.

Its easy to do at home. All you need is a printing roller, a flat surface that you can wash down ( I use a piece of perspex plastic but you can use any non-porous surface), water based ink and some drawing tools. Of couse you can use oil based inks too, but I find cleaning up at the end with white spirit stinks out my house!

Roll out your ink until your roller makes a nice 'hiss' when rolled over the ink. Ink should be thin, not sticky. It will probably look like you need to add more ink, but don't. Conditions are perfect.

Now just play! Experiement. Here I have used a pen so I can see what marks I'm making, but you can use anything. Even smudging with you finger, try experimenting with hard and soft drawing equiptment.

I've printed onto old road maps of London. The ink is only transferred to the areas where pressure was placed on the reverse side. So if writing text, remember you will need to write back to front. This can create an alien handwriting style.

 With Monoprinting in this way, of course the idea is no two prints are ever the same - hence 'mono'. But this is quite nice, I like the spontaneity of it and you can produce many prints from your inked up plate within a short space of time. Its great just for drawing out your ideas, use it for your sketch book pages like Tracey Emin.

Here I have used pigment printed fabric to draw on. On the reverse side I have drawn around the outlines of the print and coloured it in a bit. It creates a different element to the original piece of fabric and I like the contrast between the pigment print and the monoprint.

 If I turn it over you can clearly see my marks made by my biro pen and the right side where the ink has been transferred.

This was originally a drawing I made of a Basilica in Florence, Italy. I put the drawing onto a silkscreen and screenprinted it onto white linen. Here I have placed it onto my inked up plate and rubbed, using my finger, into areas where there should be shadow. The purple is the transferred ink.

 Have fun sketching in a different way. Til next time!