Monoprints (or Monotypes)

While practicing and experimenting for last year’s Christmas Card I decided to have play with some other forms of printing with the left over ink on the tray.

There is occasionally some dissention over the exact definition of monoprints vs monotypes which I will quickly engage with now. As distinct from regulated, mechanised printing (offset, giclée) when you do a first generation print, you may produce a set, but each one will differ slightly as the inking and braying will create slight variations. This would be a monoprint. If you produce simply one image which is individual and working from a clean slate this is a monotype. But I personally think the two blur and the former sounds nicer. Hence the title.

One process for producing monotypes is to lay the paper gently on the inked surface and then draw with a perncil, twig, stub, or anything else on the reverse, thus printing the ink onto the paper and this is the initial experiements I did.

You can see in the first set, the pencil drawing in reverse.

Of course this leave some ink on the surface, from which you can take a so called ghost print, which can be just as interesting as the original print. Does the monotype then become one of two monoprints?

Anyway, here’s some more.

Of course, various things can put pressure on the paper, and create prints. For these I used a ferm leaf – as you can see the initial ones were not very effective, I think tried placing the fern leave under the paper to create and outline and then re-printing the ink from the leaf in the negative space. So mono-ghost-type-prints. Or something.

This was reallly just playing about, but I think the idea will certainly be a fruitful one.