A few monotypes from this week’s workshop at MISSA
So this week I attended the Metchosin International Summer School for the Arts aka MISSA for the first time.
I’d registered for a course at MISSA in 2020, but… well, we all know what happened then. This is the first year MISSA has been back, and I picked Heather Aston’s monotype printmaking workshop because I wanted to explore prints a bit more and monotypes are totally new to me.
We did some oil-based ink prints and some watercolor monotypes. I mostly worked with oils since I’ve done watercolor painting before and not been super stoked on them (though I find myself using watercolors more than I ever plan to).
We started with lift prints on mulberry papers and while I did some texture rubbings for those, I found myself defaulting to cartooning and did some drawings of Noah Thorsen from my new webcomic, Noah’s Archipelago, as well as some sketches of Nick White from my web series The Nick White Show.
Some of these lift prints later found their way into prints via a chine collé technique, which ended up being one of my favorites from the whole week. (We did it slightly differently from what that link described but it’s basically the same idea, other than we’d already printed onto the pieces that were added via chine collé.)
I didn’t take pics of everything, but here’s a few:
Lots of Noah in my work this week, originally because I wasn’t sure what all to draw to test out the lift prints (the texture rubbings I did ended up not really being used much, other than as accents around Noah and Nick), but as I kept working it ended up helping with character development for Noah’s Archipelago.
And I have a few other prints drying between blotters on the end of my dining room table.
Anyway, great class with a great teacher and I’ve definitely gotten the monotype bug… now I’ll have to find some access to an etching press, a necessity at least for the techniques we learned this week. In the meantime, I think I might experiment with gelatin plate monotypes, and I think I would be able to incorporate lift prints and chine collé as well with some pre-planning and experimentation (would be more like collage than the way we did in in class as there wouldn’t be pressure from the press to really enmesh the paper fibres in addition to the glue’s adhesion.)
