Monoprint

When I started working with monoprint I discovered a theme and subject that I wanted to explore further, being simple portraits inspired by the works of West African photographers such as J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere and Sanlé Sory. If not for the difficulties that I faced with unwanted ink transfer and finger prints on paper, monoprint would have been my number one choice for printmaking as I love the idea of making a one of a kind print and also like the delicate lines that the technique produces.

The monoprint above was my most successful one, as there was minimal unwanted ink transfer and all of the intended marks were very defined.

These 3 prints (above) had particulary bad ink transfer outside of the desired ‘box’, there was also a lot of blotchiness created by me not spreading the ink out for long enough and making it thin enough.

These were the first three monoptints I made, I had not yet settled on a theme or subject, and was just testing techique, and playing around with shapes and marks.

To create the monoprints I rolled some printing ink directly onto a clean area on my desk, I then placed a suitable sized paper ontop of the ink, and used a pointy pen to draw an image onto the back side of the paper, when I was happy with my drawing, I lifted the paper to reveal the monoprint on the other ‘ink facing’ side.

After working with blue ink for a while I switched to creating green monoprints, I mixed some of the blue and yellow printing ink to create my desired colour. I found that the results of the green monoprints were not as good as the blue ones, as there were a lot of blotchess and patchiness, which I suspect is due to the fact that I did not mix the inks currectly. Although not perfect I think the two monoprints (above) yealded the best results out of all of the green monoprints that I created.. Finally, In order to avoid ink transfering to the paper outside of the ‘box’ I made a protective mount by cutting a square into a sheet of card paper and placed it under the monoprint paper.