Prints

Today was the second day of my weekend printmaking workshop at BSU. This workshop was all about monotypes. Now I can show you what I did. For this first print, I did some trace printing with the (white) leaves. This is when you ink the plate, lay a japanese paper on top and then draw on the back of the paper. The ink is then on the front when you are done. I did the entire plate of leaves. Then I ran the plate through the press to get the reverse, which is the background on this piece.

Then I started with a clean plate and added some paint with a brush for the color. Before running it through the press, I cut out some of the traced leaves, put acrylic medium on them and then ran the print through the press again with the new color. The glueing of pieces on the print while running it through the press is called Chine colle.



This second print was just the additive method, where you just paint directly on the plate and then run it through the press to take a print.


This print I rolled on different colors on the plate. I stamped those swirls on the plate with a rubber stamp. Then I layed down some cut out shapes and pieces of yarn on top of the plate. When run through the press, these become the white sections.

After one run, I pull off the yarn and the paper pieces. I turned the paper pieces over (they now have ink on them) and moved them to a different section of the plate. Then I ran it through the press again to get this ghost print.


Here's another print with the different color sections of ink, stamped swirls and stencils on top.


This one was also done in sections. I stamped each section as I inked it on the plate. I used the stencils again and the colored trees were stencils that I ran ink over before I put them on the plate.



Last, but not least, are my favorites. These are trace prints where you ink the plate, put the thin paper down and then draw on the back to pick up the ink. What I found difficult with this technique is that any amount of pressure on the paper will pick up ink. So you can't rest your hand on the paper. It made it a little harder for me to draw the lines when my hand was raised in the air.

I can't believe these are my favorites because I feel like I really don't know how to draw birds very well. Fortunately, the teacher had brought some copies of black and white illustrations and this is what I was looking at as I drew them. The tree branches I did because it took such a long time for the first three birds, I was getting tired of drawing them.