A week ago I went to a Watercolour Monotype Printmaking Workshop hosted by a great local artist/musician/craftster/all-round-nice-gal
Sarah Hallman. A local group called
Les Ateliers organized it.
It was a really fun afternoon. Kudos to all.
Just before leaving my house to go to Sarah's I became totally intimidated at having to come up with an image on the spot surrounded by a bunch of strangers so I quickly swiped a few sheets of reference material from my desk and stuffed them in my purse. The sheets happened to contain several variations of traditional-tattoo-style Great Apes (because I'd been thinking of painting one soon)... so that's what I ended up making a print of.
After the initial printing at Sarah's I applied several more layers/styles of "printing" to my ape before feeling happy enough that I put it in a cheap Ikea "Ribba" frame and added it to the "Ribba-Framed Print Gallery" in my kitchen.
Here's the progress.
First I loosely drew the ape's face on the paper to be printed:
This is the plate, covered in Gum Arabic and watercolours. Unfortunately I didn't logic-out the fact that I should have reversed the watercolours in order to register them with the drawing. My bad.
Since the drawing and printed colour were so misaligned due to my oversight, I worked into the print with more watercolour. This was the state of things when I left Sarah's that day:
After pondering whether to stash my monster-piece in the closet or the garbage can I ultimately decided to experiment further on it and see what I could do:
- I used a stencil and silkscreen to screen the dark grey hair and pupils,
- the "R" is an old, wooden letterpress letter I have kicking around,
- used masking tape and a lino-roller to add bits of pink and yellow to the background,
- painted into the mouth area,
- used an old eraser to "print" the pink muzzle dots...
I think that's all... This is what I ended up with:
So... after playing around with it throughout the week I liked my ape enough to frame it and hang it in my kitchen (at least for a little while - for the memories of the day and of trying something different).
(I guess I made an "in-between-print" instead of an
"in-between-painting" this week...)
Here it is on the wall:
This is only part of the kitchen's "Ribba Print Gallery"... it continues on another wall.
The closest one (the cat) is a print by Canadian printmaker and graphic novelist
Laurence Hyde that I found in the basement of my building!! (It was in an old, falling-apart frame.)
Speaking of cats, here's a (very) little illustration I did recently for an American publication inspired by my own luxuriating cats... just to give you an idea of what my commercial work looks like - in contrast to the Great Ape print.
OK. Thanks again to the hosts of the printing-party and thanks to whoever made it all the way through this post to read this line. I appreciated your eyeballs.
