I’d been vaguely aware of the existence of monotyping before, but until I found an old copy of The Painterly Print in a Notting Hill second-hand bookshop I hadn’t really considered trying it out. It’s a good way to use up the leftover ink I dollop out onto my glass plate after doing a batch of prints from something else (in this case, a set of 20 woodblock printed cards – they’ll be up online when they’re dry enough to scan) and it’s great fun.

The printmaking process I’ve been using so far doesn’t give much latitude for Messing Around with the ink – roll it on thinly and evenly and start smoothing away with the baren, and that’s it. What I did with the leftover ink, after doing 20 A6 cards, was to roll it out evenly across the glass plate, smear it around in wide curves with a piece of kitchen roll, mess it around a lot with a brush (artificial bristle, no. 8 or so) and then scrape a lot of loops and whorls with the stump end of the same brush.

Because there was just so much ink left over, I could press really lightly with the baren, and get a vivid black/white contrast I hadn’t expected. Black ink on glass over even a quite light surface (one of the inner pages of the Waltham Forest News) doesn’t show up much of a contrast between thick and nearly-cleared layers, so the looping white and pale grey lines I got were a pleasant surprise.

I managed to take three cognates from the plate as well as the print itself, though the fourth is mostly cloudy tones rather than noticeable lines.

I’m quite pleased with this one. The image of a white tree on a black ground is something I’ve been trying to do for a while now, and not managed to my satisfaction. I did this partly as an excuse to use the new white ink (Graphic Chemical printer’s ink – though having switched to a tin and spatula with the black, going back to the stiff metal tube for the white is painful) – or to put it another way, I got the white ink so I’d feel impelled to use it! The paper is Fabriano Tiziano, which is technically a pastel paper, but is also the best coloured paper I’ve found. The black handmade paper I posted about a while back is very nice, but it’s about as lightfast as your average Ringwraith, so no good there. I’m not sure about the rating of this stuff, but it’s got to be a great deal better.

I’m not so good at the symmetry thing, being thoroughly right-handed – it’s much, much easier for me to draw the network lines going up and to the left than it is to draw them up and to the right. The right hand side of the tree is much more fluid and less cluttered as a result.

It turns out that Rheotech gloss gel medium – which I actually use much more often as a clear or tinted glaze, since it’s better at covering odd surfaces than picture varnish is, and it’s more permanent – interacts really badly with printer’s ink. It picks it up and smears it around, making a peculiar hazy grey smudge everywhere.

Whilst it’s an interesting effect, and one I’ll almost certainly want to use some other time, it’s just ruined a collage I was making, so I’m quite annoyed.

I’ve been experimenting today with block printing directly onto fabric, and it’s come out pretty well. I used my cartouche block, with the same printer’s ink (incidentally, using a 1lb tin and a spatula instead of a squeezy metal tube makes things quite a lot easier) and a metal spoon to make sure the ink penetrated right the way through the fabric.

This stuff has proved far too tenacious to wash out of paper once it’s dried in, so I’m hoping it’ll be the same in a normal wash – obviously, I’ll do a test wash first rather than putting it in with my good shirts!

The only problem with the setup I was using is the difficulty of keeping the fabric away from the block once I’ve done the transfer and started to peel it off. The way I set it up was to turn the T-shirt inside out, lay it on my worktable with the label facing down, lift up the top (front) side, and slip the pre-inked block in before letting the fabric down slowly and smoothing it out as I went. That part worked out pretty well, though next time I’ll probably use some artist’s tape to stiffen the fabric around the printing area first.

Another way to do it would be to lay the block down first as normal, then lower the fabric onto it with something inside the garment to stiffen it up and stop the ink from transferring right through. Rubbing it through both layers probably wouldn’t work well, but given that the ink glues the substrate down very effectively it would be extremely easy to turn the T-shirt inside out around the block.

A third way, of course, would be to lay the T-shirt down right-side-out and front-up, and then lower a vinyl block onto it. Whilst I haven’t tried printing this way yet, the vinyl is flexible enough that it should be entirely possible to rub from the back of the plate rather than the back of the substrate.

It did turn out that I could have done with a couple of extra hands when peeling the fabric off the block, but stiffening it up (ideally I’d use a tapestry frame, but finding one large enough to give enough clear space inside but small enough to fit inside a T-shirt and get a decent grip all around might be problematic) should deal with that one too.

Elly (my girlfriend) was watching me do some printing the other day, and asked if she could have a go just as I was thinking about suggesting it. (Especially since I’d just picked up some Ellie Poo paper…) Here’s the results. It’s turned out rather nicely.

This is the print done with a spoon, as promised. It’s slightly different paper (from my stock – I’ve not been keeping as good track of it as I’d like to, so I’m not completely sure whether this is Fabriano Accademia or Atlantis Heritage Woodfree).

Notice the sheer amount of ink on the flat areas, and the way all the internal cut ridges show up – they got just as much ink on them in the first one, but the baren didn’t press the paper down into them in the same way that the hard, solid spoon does.

As promised!

This was the first one I pulled from the block, done on Daler-Rowney Canford paper with a (cheap) baren. The ones I did with a spoon are still drying, since there’s so much more ink on them (in them, in fact) so I can’t post a comparison picture yet.

I’ve just taken half a dozen prints from the Brigid’s Cross block I posted about before, since I finally finished carving it tonight.

It’s always an amazing feeling to peel off the first print and see the results – once it translates itself from vinyl & wet ink to paper (and reverses itself in the process) it makes it really easy to look on my work with new eyes. It stops being the piece of vinyl I’ve had on my table for the last month, and I can finally see how all those awkward curves and chunky lines, the unexpected holes and the scars where the sankakuto slipped, transform themselves on paper.

I experimented for a couple of them, going back to the serving spoon (solid, sturdy 1950s EPNS) I used when I first started doing this. It’s much harder and gives a very solid line, and unlike the baren it doesn’t have a grain, so that changes how you use it. Also unlike the baren, it wasn’t designed to be used in that position, so it leaves my right hand and wrist aching. And rather warm, because the friction of the plated steel across the back of the paper gets it hot enough to be uncomfortable.

Tomorrow, when they’re dry, I’ll post pictures for comparison.i

There’s something special about using white ink – I’m not quite sure what it is, but it’s there. This particular ink – Daler-Rowney FW – works well on leather, which is why I originally picked it up, but of course it’s ideal for black paper too. (And much less cliched than using silver ink.) This is some particularly nice handmade paper, very heavy and rough-textured, from Nepal. The design’s much more open, with fewer & thinner lines, than I normally do, but I think it works.

This is another version of the same dragon – I resized a cleaned-up version of the black & white outline I did, printed it out onto some parchment-textured paper I found in my stash, and then inked it. Literally inked, that is – the green & red are calligraphy ink, applied with a pen, but the bronze outlining is acrylic paint.