2 Monoprint: Creating initial stencils for experimentation

Straight in to printing for week 2. I prepared a stencil at home the night prior, drawing a freehand face on Yupo paper and cut out some further freehand stencils of ‘dead’ trees from Khadi paper in class after the printing demo, keeping the positive and negative cut outs to play around with. I’d also brought in some scraps of various recycled papers and offcuts I’ve been hoarding for years to play around with the individual properties of paper types and their differing textures.

I shared a glass inking slab with Lily and Summer, we spent some time adding colour to ink that had been prepared during the demo working towards a bright, bluish green. After rolling out my first lot of ink on my plate, I placed several of my stencils, working intuitively, though taking time with my placement to fit in curves of the trees alongside the curves of the face. I tore up some corrugated, recycled paper and placed it along the bottom edge to create hills and a sense of landscape. My process and the results are documented in the images below.

Printed on 250 gsm Stonehenge paper in white, quartered one 76 x 46 cm sheet, producing two prints.

Yupo paper stencil + Recycled paper from parcel

One of my initial stencils created at home, drawn freehand and cut from Yupo.

Khadi paper stencils

Cut freehand in the studio during class time - hoping that the thick watercolour/khadi paper round will add an emboss when printing.

Khadi paper stencils 2

Keeping both the positive and negative’s of the stencils to use in my stencil arrangements. I thought the round paper with a slight deckle edge might add extra interest to my prints. I also wanted to see if the texture of the paper would come through in ghost prints.

Rolling out the ink

Used the colour shown in the demo during class, Lily and I added a little more blue and white to the mix to alter it slightly.

Arranging stencils for my first print

I didn’t approach laying out my stencils with a plan in mind - I placed them quite intuitively. As I assembled them on the plate I made little decisions to try and fit curves of some shapes in with others.

Ghost printing

Flipping my stencils over and rearranging them to create a ghost print over my initial print.

The result

Here you can see my initial print was very high contrast - solid green and white. Printing the ghost print over the top and rearranging/flipping some stencils allowed for a fair amount of tonal variation and softened the contrast significantly.

Looking at ghosts on my plate

Printing a third ghost from my plate

I rearranged my stencils and again flipped some to try a print on another piece of paper (using Stonehenge here) to see what a third pull through would look like. Could have placed another stencil on the left side, or even inked up a stencil to create some darker areas in this image - wasn’t as satisfied with the balance/placement.