Klimt Monoprint

On Google+ I'm in a Printmaking community that talks about and shares our ideas and projects in the printmaking mediums, and the other day one of the community members, Ken Swinson, posted some monoprints he had done. Seeing what he had done made me excited and made me want to work on some monoprints. Thats when I my brain was stuck by lightning, I was working on a project for my oil painting class and I decided this process (monoprint) would be perfect for this project.

For those who are unfamiliar with printmaking and its processes, typically in printmaking you will carve or etch into a surface, you will roll that surface up with ink and then you run the image and paper threw a press where the ink is transferred to your paper and you have a print. In short, printmaking is like glorified stamp making. In this process you can make countless images and they will typically turn out the same. But monoprints are different. As stated in their name "mono" means one, so you can only create one print from a monoprint, making them as original and unique as an oil painting. Ill explain the process.

So for my monoprint, I took a large sheet of plexiglass and on the back of it I drew the image onto it so that I had a reference, and so it was easier to register the different colors. Then I will roll the whole plate up with ink. Because I knew this was going to be a 4 colored image, I started with my light color moving to my darker color. This is just a flat piece of plexiglass so where I dont want ink I had to remove it by scraping it with plastic scrapers, cotton balls, q-tips, and anything else that would either remove the ink completely or give me a fun texture so as the other colors over lap the image would be visually interesting.

The other thing I used to remove/give me interesting textures was use mineral spirits. When the solvent touches the ink, the ink will spread and leaves interesting marks. It was a lot of fun to play with and adds interest to the image, but always safety first, so make sure you're in a nice ventilated space. So you notice that I wiped away the ink from where the figures were, and some patterns in the dress. Here I have added the yellow ink and also the magenta ink, and you can start to see the magic of layering thin opaque inks. Where the magenta overlaps the yellow it becomes orange. And you can control how bright the colors will be depending on how thick the ink is rolled out on the plate. For example, the color here is more red-orange because the magenta is more dominate because it was thicker then the yellow. But if I wanted a more yellow orange or even a brighter orange I would use less magenta so the yellow would shine through more.

Now I added the cyan color which gave me the greens and violets. The image is more rounded now with a little more depth because of the lighter colors coming forward and the darker colors pushing the image back.

Lastly I added the black ink to add even more contrast to the image. I kept the figures blank because I knew I was going to add oil paint to them, otherwise I would have added more colors to them.

And here is my final image. After all that time scraping, rubbing, and playing with mineral spirits, I finished my print and painted the figures. I call it "Disagreement in Green" and the size is 23 3/4" x 20". Whew, could you image is picture matted and framed in a nice black frame? It would look really sharp!!