Assignment 5: Experimenting with monotypes

Further to my previous experiments with monotypes and oil transfer I had another play with this technique. I tried using water soluble drawing ink. The results was quite interesting as this is not a suitable medium for this technique. I tried applying the ink directly to perspex with a pipette - this resulted in small beads of colour as the perspex is water resitant - the beads spread out when the paper is placed on the perspex giving an abstract image which I quite like.

I then used a combination of colourless oil bar smeared on he perspex and scraped areas away with a cotton bud. I filled these voids with india ink. The results were pretty much uncontrollable but I really like some of the marks that the ink and oil make in combination.

Some of the results are just completely abstract blobs of these beautiful marks. I liked the marks so mich, however, I decided to include them in my sketchbook. On the one below, I have laid a contour drawing self portrait on a sheet of acetate over the marks.

I then drew the basic tonal planes of my face onto the perspex using oil bar and printed from that. The results differed depending on how many times I had printed from the plate. On the third pass there was a ghost of an image which I preferred to the first two passes and I worked into this one using india ink squirted from an insulin syringe.

The image below is of the perspex plate covered in a mixture of oil bar and india ink. This is what I was left with on the plate after several unsuccessful attempts to print from it. I really like this image - it is a portrait but very simplistic reduced to basic shapes and has quite a haunting quality about it.