Part 1: Project 1: Second attempt at Monoprinting

I thought I’d start by drawing the desired image onto the clean copper plate using a black sharpie. Then paint the ink (oil based this time) in turquoise, pink and gold instead of purple, green and gold. Yesterday’s “purple” looked rather blue and was too close to green on the colour wheel for my liking. However, I liked the textured effect of brush marks on the copper plate.

I stuck with the same selection of objects – the Buddha’s head, with the sculpture of a singer. As the pine cone appeared to have been omitted from yesterday’s efforts in water based ink, I tried to make more of a feature of it in today’s. I had thought I may make a substitution for something else entirely.

I drew a design onto the plate with a black sharpie, as follows:

It feels a bit like cheating, doing it this way. I still feel slightly trepidatious attempting a print. It’s as though I’m taking some kind of a risk. The overall feeling is one of experimentation and the excitement that brings. But there is also an underlying fear that the act of “play” does not equate to a “proper job” or “real work”.

Given the luxury of extra drying time in using oil based instead of water based inks, I took advantage of this by attempting more detail in painting onto the plate.

The resulting print, though not centred correctly on the paper (or in fact on the right side of a textured paper) is nevertheless a vast improvement on yesterday’s rather hurried attempt:

I cleaned the ink from the plate using vegetable oil. Happily, my sharpie pen marks were only slightly less defined, therefore tomorrow I shall attempt a further experiment.

Looking back at my last post, I notice the colour of the photograph of the inked plate and realise that blue, orange (copper colour) and greenish-gold or turquoise, would look rather effective together. I think at the very least I may deepen the pink of the background to more of a salmon pink.