A few monotypes of Ricky B. Rat
So I took a monotype printmaking workshop today up in Ladysmith, same place I took the gelli printing workshop last month.
(Explanation of monotypes here. We used Akua inks on plexiglas plates and used a press.)
Last time I took a monotype workshop, it was at MISSA and I ended up doing 3 of Noah (plus a couple Nicks and several that had nothing to do with my characters, of course).
Somehow I kinda assumed I would end up doing monotypes of Noah today again, too.
But then our instructor mentioned the first mini-project of the day was to split the plate and do half as a dark field image (ie, ink it up first, then remove ink to make the images) and half as a light field image (ie, leave it blank and just add lines/textures in ink) and I had a fuzzy vision of doing Ricky B. that way.
Which resulted in this:
If I’d been going to leave it at this stage then I really needed to have a thicker layer of black ink on the dark field side, but I added some further color layers to end up with this rendering of Ricky:
I also did another print based on first some random rolling out of greys from the brayer and then drawing Ricky over top with goopy black ink on Q-Tips, then pulling ghost prints of the same green and magenta layers from the first print onto this one:
The top yellow and orange layer of that got a ghost print onto a fresh sheet of paper as a background and then I printed a blobby drawing of Ricky on top of that:
I also pulled 2 ghost prints of the black drawing layer of this last one, one with a layer on top of green, pink, and yellow swirls), but those are unfinished because I plan to work back into them with acrylic markers so I’ll wait to post those til that’s done.
Here’s a few detail pics:
