Over the past few months I have spent a lot of time working on black-line prints. These, by their nature, take considerable patience and care to carve. It was a nice break this week therefore to spend an afternoon creating some low-stakes monotype prints.

Monotypes are created by applying ink onto a flat surface such as glass or acetate, then laying paper over the surface and working its underside so as to press the ink from the glass onto the paper. How the ink is laid down, and how the paper is worked determine that nature of the print that is achieved. Ink can, for example, be applied in a painterly way, such that when the paper is pressed the image pulled from the surface is a mirror image of that painted or drawn onto the surface. The Eighteenth Century poet and artist, William Blake, produced some of his work this way. Alternatively, the ink can be laid down flat and without feature, and the image then achieved by lightly laying down paper onto the ink and using tools to ‘press’ the ink selectively from the paper. The tools used might include pencils, brushes, metal instruments, the hand, or anything else that when pressed onto the paper will make it pick up ink. The finer the tool and the lighter the pressure, the finer and lighter the mark and tone.

Monotypes are, given the nature of the process, singular beasts. They are non-repeatable and in this way they share something with painting and drawing —though, unlike both, the process involved in creating a monotype is a blind one in that the image remains unseen until the paper is pulled from the ink. This can be both exhilarating and frustrating in equal measure.

The print below is monotype that I based upon a sketch that I made one evening at dusk. To create it, I marked up guidelines for ink and paper on a glass sheet and very lightly laid down a 15 x 10 cm rectangle of letterpress ink. I then placed a 25 x 20 cm sheet of 145 gsm Zerkall printing paper over the surface (having previously taped a 15 x 10 cm piece of typing paper to its reverse side in the area that would lay over the ink). Taking care not to press onto the paper with my hands, I taped its corners to the glass and then drew onto the underside of the paper with a variety of different pencils. These ranged from 2h to 3b, and the marks that they made can be seen both in the trees themselves and in the cross-hatched lines beneath them. The weight of the paper itself picks up ink and it is this that lends tone to the sky.

*Dusk*, Monotype on Zerkall printing paper, edition of 1, 15 × 10 cm

It is often held that the surface used to create a monotype can only be used the once. When a monotype is made from drawing or painting in ink, this is certainly true in that any subsequent impressions taken from the surface will grow increasingly paler. After the initial impression is taken, what remains are ‘ghosts’. Such ghosts will be familiar to anyone who has pressed newsprint to a linocut or wood engraving block after printing in order to clean the block. Ghosts are even more evident when a monotype has been created from a toneless area of ink. Once the paper has been removed, ink will have been lifted from the areas that the tools have pressed, leaving a negative impression of the print on the glass or upon whatever surface was used. A print can then be taken from this negative by again laying paper onto the inked area and applying consistent pressure across it. Such a negative can be seen in the picture below.

Positive and negative monotype

Rhydymain Poems

Sometimes simple is the hardest thing