Monoprint

Sadly we have reached our last project of the unit and of the year. However, it was a great way to end the year as it was by far one of my most favorite assignments. In this assignment we were asked to create a monoprint, a monoprint is a single print taken from a design or picture created in printing ink on glass or metal.  There are three types of monoprints, additive or light-field method which is when the image is painted by adding or building up pigment onto the plate. The second type is subtractive aka dark-field method where the entire plate is covered in a thin layer of pigment which then the artist removes some of the pigment using a brush, rag, stick or any other tool. The last method is a combination of the two called, combination.

However in this case, we first choose a piece of paper to paste our prints and designs onto, I choose a violet colored paper and then we were told to use bits of tissue paper and newspaper to create different textures and designs on our paper. 

Then once we finished applying our basic designs for the background, we were able to use a variety of stencils to print onto our paper. We printed these stencils by first choosing one, then we pasted it onto these Gelli art printing surface. In order to get the negative of the stencils we had to print the inside of the stencils using ink, however if we wanted to use the positive of the stencils we had to ink the outside of the stencils, meaning if there was a circle if you wanted the negative we would ink outside the circle but if we wanted to the positive we would ink the outside of the circle. Then once we finished inking the stencils, we toke out the stencils and pressed the Gelli surface onto our paper and peeled it off after a few seconds of pressing on it. What I liked about this gel surface was you could use the same design many different times as the ink toke a while for it to run out. Once the Gelli surface was cleaned, we could continue this process for more designs. I choose the rose stencils and used its negative space, so I printed roses onto my violet background in a black ink as I felt it would contrast against the violet and hence pop out a bit more.  Here is a picture which displays the concept of negative and positive art!

Once we finished that we were given the choice to use photograph to print and paste onto our print for a negative or positive effect. I choose a picture of flowers, and decided to cut out the flower petals and use my background to fill in the flowers space. I did this by first converting the photo into black and white, then I printed it out and cut the flowers out leaving the backgrounds of the leaves. Then we glued the picture onto our background paper.The next step was where creativity came into place as we were able to use any type of utensil to create any type of design to embellish onto our print. I think I was the most successful in this part of the project because it was the easiest as I used white out to portray the flower petals of my cut out flower.