Spirit

Tags: Monotype, Printmaking, Traditional Media

Medium: Monotype
Description: This one was a fairly experimental print. As I was working on it, I hated it, but now that it’s finished, I find myself looking at it again and again. The process by which it was made really shows off the flexibility of monotype–first I inked the plate and wiped away most of the ink to print an accent on top of a previously made print, then I used the ghost from that as a base over which I draw a figure in watercolor crayon. Then I printed that. I didn’t like the result of watercolor crayon over ink though, but I did like the way the figure drawing had turned out. I reinked the plate without cleaning it off, and used a rag to wipe out a figure based on the faint watercolor crayon lines I could see through the ink, producing the image on the left. Then I printed the ghost of that, making the image on the right, in which you can still see faintly some of the black watercolor crayon lines. Using a rag to draw reductively in ink is very different from my usual method, but in this case at least I really like the results.