Floral Monotypes with Stencils

Had great fun at last night's evening class led by Mandy Pattullo. So good when someone else is doing the teaching. I learn so much and not just about the subject in hand but teaching styles and many other snippets. The pressure is off and in two and a half short hours you can't be too precious about what you are doing.

Last night I was on a roll. Not sure the prints were that fantastic, I'll have to look at them again with a fresh eye tomorrow when I'm back in the studio, but I sure as hell had fun. I cut out a series of acetates, a 20 x 20 cm plate and a 20 x 20 piece of blown wall paper - the relief kind - and just two colours Cadmium yellow deep hue and cyan.

Both colours were mixed with transparent ink as well as the solid tin colour. I began by inking up the plate with a blended rollup of the cadmium yellow deep hue and a lighter version of it. I then rolled ink onto the wall paper and pressed it on to the inked surface of the plate. This was followed by inking up each acetate with solid cadmium yellow deep on either the top or bottom along with transparent cyan at the opposite end of the acetate. The acetates were carefully placed on top of the inked plate in the correct positions.

At the start I also drew into the ink with a kebab stick and cotton earbuds but as the evening progressed I abandoned this idea to pare the image down. The first couple of prints were fairly average but I could see the potential especially once I got into working with the ghost image when i peeled off the acetates and flipped them to build up the image. I'll post jpegs tomorrow when I am back in the studio.