Fifth week of mono printing

The fifth class was when I started to get the hang of the techniques and processes of mono printing and knew what prints I expected to see.

I made more stencils based on the idea of the contrasting atmosphere between the vulnerable nature of Flagstaff Garden in the middle of Melbourne City. When I visited there, the weather was gloomy and the sky was grey, which had a similar colour scheme to the cold colours of the tall, modern buildings over the horizon of green trees. This coincidentally matched the two colours of the previous seagull prints.

The printing process was the same, except I made green and greys darker to convey a sense of bleakness in the imagery.

Transferring the ink…

This was when I printed the stencils the second time, with varied positions. It was easier to create rectangular and square-shaped stencils to portray city landscapes with various appearances of buildings when they had to be layered on top of each other. You can see that I used a strip of paper towel across the top area of the print. I wanted to highlight the cloudy weather, not using paper and showing a different texture. A paper towel was easy to find and also somewhat transparent like clouds.

I ran it through the printing press…

And this is how it looked like

You can see the faint lines of the first print, visualising the buildings behind the focus point.

This is how I finalised the purple neuron print:

I used the neuron stencils which still had wet inks on, twice on the same paper but placed upside down. This allowed the print to have a whole swarm of neurons. *

The green hill and the person represents me standing on the highest hill at Flagstaff Garden when I got the inspiration from memory related to the topic of Place. When I first placed the hill stencil on the board, I thought it would rather look awkward when the green colour is just cut off on the print.

So I decided to make a gradual tone of green on the end of the inked area by softly wiping the ink away with a paper towel.

Moving on to the seagull print, I used the first seagull stencil I made, but on the print with neurons with a pink background.

I wanted the seagull to have more details in terms of colour, so I used subtle gradation between green and grey.

This is the final result I got:

I was quite satisfied, except for the mistake of not covering the slight green ink outside the stencil since it made a subtle mark on the print’s bottom area. Overall, I thought the print came out with satisfactory results, matching my intention to make it look simple and subtle, yet with some delicacy.