Monoprinting

After doing so many workshops and learning new printing techniques, I felt as though I needed to have a go in the print room. I want to make sure that the work I am doing is relevant to my project so I decided that monoprinting would suit my work best, as I could paint anything I wanted onto a blank screen.

I am also keen to improve my overall printing skills and get used to the new print room, so that by 3rd Year I feel confident in doing this. As part of this I also want to get used to fabrics, and understand how I should use them in the print room, as in layering them up, and working out how many pulls to give the binder on different types of fabric.

The prints that I created were based on drawings from my sketchbook.

I wanted to try the line drawing print to see how much detail I could achieve with this technique. I thought it worked quite well but the line quality looked a bit like felt tip. It was still interesting to know that I could achieve detail with mono printing, without the dye smudging.

I created 6 prints in the print room, with 2 different designs, but I was only really happy with 2 or 3 of them. This is because of the fact that 2 fabrics were layered up (the underneath one didn't come through properly) but it was really useful to see how fabrics reacted, and to see how many prints I could get out of painting one screen.

I decided to embroider on top of one of the prints that I wasn't too pleased with, due to the dye not penetrating the fabric properly (as it was underneath another fabric). I thought the sharpness of the stitch contrasted well with the blurred, grainy quality of the print behind it.