chriswoodartist

A monoprint is a one off hand made print – not a reproduction but an image transferred from one surface onto another.

To give a little context to the above two images my preferred printmaking media are wood engraving and linocut. At the end of a days printmaking, invariably I have some leftover ink and rather than waste it I usually make a few mono prints. In common with most printmakers, I mix my ink on a sheet of glass and thin down the ink to get the consistency that I need. Some printmakers use additives to speed up the drying time. You can also add extenders to make the ink more transparent but I don’t usually bother as I like a solid opaque ink for linocuts.

There are numerous ways of making a monoprint – I favour simply laying a sheet of paper over the inked glass plate and drawing on paper with whatever comes to hand – either a soft pencil or a biro pen. The challenge is that you have to draw without putting the heel of your hand on the paper to steady yourself, otherwise you will stick the paper to the ink making a a solid area of tone. I like to have a print that, for the most part, has a linear quality, with a few bits of random texture which are provided by drawing with a nice blunt object – usually my finger ! The top print is a positive and a one off print but having created a positive you have a choice of making a negative from the leftover image on the glass OR you can layer up some more ink, thus destroying the image – hence the term monoprint. The negative version is a ghosted image because where you have drawn on the back of the paper you are transferring the ink from the surface and leaving behind A white line. If we look at the foreground of the top image there is a dark patch of ink which corresponds with the paler patch in the foreground of the lower image. At this point I should add that to make the first positive print once you have drawn your image on the paper you can gently peel the paper away from the surface of the inked glass and hey presto – you have a print with a very unpredictable quality. To make the negative print,  you place another sheet of paper over the surface of your glass, then you push down on the paper with the heel of your hand. To achieve acceptable results is a combination of using a thin enough paper (I use newsprint or shoji Japanese paper) and getting the consistency of the ink right. This is really the same with all printmaking if your ink isn’t just right or you are using inferior paper sadly your results will suffer.

if you are new to printmaking, I should point out that the drawing is reversed – so my tree was on the right hand side of the paper and on the print it is reversed and on the left.

The subject is a Bulls Road in Henley, Suffolk UK. and whilst I use photographic references for my painting, with drawings and prints the images are usually based on memory. I have always done lot of observational drawing, in sketchbooks and I find if you draw something for an hour or more, it tends to imprint itself on your memory. This is also a motif that I have drawn many times.

more from the archive later ! Goodnight one and all !
copyright Chris N Wood all rights reserved 21.34 23.11.25