Spring colours?

 Some friends have asked me to run a day of monoprinting for them in  a couple of week's time. Most of them are selling artists but they all paint and I think printmakers use a different part of our brains so I am up for the challenge. I will probably concentrate on the subtractive side of monoprinting as I think it will appeal to they way they work but I must not assume and need to have all the areas covered on the day. I don't do monoprinting that often so I've been working in the shed for the past week or so revisiting all of the techniques and having a play. I have had a whale of a time and found myself chomping at the bit to get up there every day, something that I am guilty of avoiding if my mind is occupied elsewhere. I have stayed focussed and found a huge range of dried plant material I layered into a few telephone directories last summer and promptly forgot about.

 As is the way with monoprinting, once you start, one print leads to another as you amass all the stencil and printed elements and keep turning them over or printing a ghost. Some are unmitigated disasters but if you keep layering print on print you come up with some intriguing things. All are completely unrepeatable and when I look at some of them I am already hard pressed to know how they came to being! I have raced through a large pile of paper and am awaiting much needed supplies in order to continue.

 I've lost count of the number of prints I've pulled but as the paper supply dwindled I needed something to use up the ink I'd put out and I found a stack of small bookmarks in the drawer that I cut a couple of years ago for the UWE Bookmarks project. I tediously cut 100 of them and then went and did something else so they've languished there for a couple of years now.....

 Well, no longer as I started to use them to finish off the ink I'd put out. On the first session I was using black and a couple of days later I'd moved onto an Azure Blue. Each time I've put some aside and then worked on a few of them in the second colour. Today was colour number three, an intense cadmium orange. I'd been looking at some bedlinen online the other day in vibrant blue and orange and knew I just had to roll out the juicy citrus shade for today. I've almost got a bit carried away with something that I started merely to use up materials. Back to the real focus tomorrow I think. Time to get subtractive and roll out the black ink again. Can't beat a bit of monochrome monoprint!