Return to Monotype

Acetate pebble shapes as masks and stencils

Christmas 2019 is done and dusted for another year. We’re in that limbo inbetween time before the New Year heralds in 2020. With my final Christmas Fair, The Designer Makers Market out of the way, that left me free to concentrate on domestic Christmas preparations. It also left me free to return to the studio to get on with printmaking.

I have been pretty organized this year where Christmas is concerned. While there was still stuff to do, I had wriggle room to think about new work. Ideas were swirling through my brain that needed to be put out into the world. They involved putting collagraphs to one side for a bit so I could concentrate on monotype as a print medium on its own again - something I haven’t done for quite some time.

The urge to go back to monotype came out of a the last workshop I ran for 2019. For demonstration purposes I made some acetate stencils and masks - simple round pebble shapes - for the workshop.  These were giving me interesting results. I was keen to see how far I could take things.  I last worked with acetate shapes to make my floral prints. I wanted to be more experimental this time, working with layers of colour.

THE PROCESS

Each layer dictates or suggests what to do next so it is a very intuitive process. I entered the studio with an idea of what I wanted to achieve, but what happens between the ink and the acetate after each pass through the press pointed me in the direction of travel.   

This was my first attempt and I was very happy with the result. I started with the bottom half of the print, printing in three layers. I then masked that area off and printed one layer of colour for the sky. This was followed by printing the silhouette of Holy Island with a blended roll up over the sky section using a mask. I finished off with another layer of color that ran across the entire image. 

Following the making of this print I got a lot more ambitious and subsequent prints have not come nearly as easily as this one did. I decided to make things more complicated, deliberately so, not because I like to torture myself but because I’m constantly learning, even after twenty years plus of printmaking. I don’t want my work to stand still, preserved in aspic. When I keep pushing the boundaries I discover new things I can then use to develop my practice further as I mix and match, bringing together collagraphs and monotype. You’ll have to wait and see how the other prints come together.  

If you want a chance to benefit from the things I learn along the way you can always sign up for a workshop in 2020 for an insight.

After five layers of colour

After the sixth and final layer of colour