Fourth week of mono printing

Before my fourth class, I created a few other stencils of a seagull and a net of neurons with a Yupo paper. I wanted to highlight the emotionless eyes and facial expression of the bird, so I zoomed into that imagery and created a large, simplified stencil of its face. For the neuron, I was contemplating the topic of Place and was inspired by the story that the Flagstaff Garden used to have a great view of the sea. I thought from a human’s perspective, the memory of a place significantly determines the place itself. Therefore, the concept of neurons, a crucial part of our body in terms of memory, was developed.

I first sketched the neurons on an A4-sized area with a mechanical pencil.

Then I cut the negative space out with a small box knife. (I forgot to take a photo of the seagull one)

In the studio, I began by assorting all the colours onto the board, such as green and grey, pink and blue for the neurons.

This is how I assorted the seagull stencil before running it through the printing press. As the eye stencil was separate, the placement of the eye substantially determined its appearance. It took a while to place it on a spot where it didn’t look out of proportion to a bird’s face structure. I also realised the bird stencil was bigger than the inked area, but I went along with it anyway.

This is how it turned out:

It was maybe too simple, that it made me laugh a little at its derpy face.

Moving onto the neuron print, I used softer colours of pink and purple.

I just used the same board without cleaning the previous use of inks, which worked fine, only had a small inconvenience in that I had to spread the ink with care not to touch the green and grey inks.

I was very satisfied with the result of this neuron print, as I didn’t expect it to be so clear and in shape. The pink-to-purple gradation on the top and bottom of the print made it look more interesting, too. Personally, those two similar colours - purple and pink - represents mystery and the human body, which again connects to my perception of neural science in the human brain. This print's colour combination strongly reminded me of my high school psychology textbook illustrations as well.

Then I made one more with pink ink!

The same process where I spread the ink, ink the roller and transfer the ink onto the board.

Place it on the printing press with the stencil, then the paper. This was the outcome:

I was satisfied that the inked area on the paper was neatly positioned and all across the paper, yet the fact that the stencil was too small to spread all across the print was slightly disappointing to see.