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I just finished teaching a monoprint class

Last week, I went to the Interlochen College of Creative Arts to teach a 3-day intensive course in monoprint printmaking to a group of 6 adults. A monoprint is a type of print you make by painting or rolling ink onto a surface (a metal plate or plexiglass, for instance), manipulating the ink in different ways, then pressing paper onto the plate and applying pressure, either by hand-rubbing or a printing press. You usually only get one print at a time this way, hence the name "monoprint." (Strictly speaking, there is a difference between a monotype and a monoprint, but I'm not terribly purist about that.)

It was a great class, very tiring for all concerned, but we got some great prints out of it. On the first day, we spent some time outside making contact monoprints while doing some blind contour drawing:


Here are a few prints from that session:



The next photo shows a plexiglass plate on the bed of my portable printing press, the image painted freely with Akua intaglio inks using q-tips instead of a brush:


And this is the print that came out:


To keep track of the various combinations of inks, papers, and so forth, I drew a chart on the whiteboard so that people could check off the type of print after they had completed it:


On the final day, we made larger size monoprints by taping together two sheets of acetate, and combining all the inking and wiping methods we'd been trying out for three days: rolling ink on, brushing it on, using stencils, masking out certain areas, wiping out ink here and there. Here is one participant's print above the inked up acetate it was printed from:


Some truly glorious prints came out of this:


And what was so great about the whole session was that there were a couple of people with art school experience, and several people with no experience, yet they all produced really high quality prints. 

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