Monotype Demonstration Last Night

I was asked to do a Monotype workshop for Tampa Regional Artists last night in Hyde Park. I must admit that I spent two intense days preparing for this, as it is not easy to pull prints in front of an audience and have the presentation flow properly. I had approximately one hour to show them a couple of types of Monotypes. I have been doing hand printed oil paint Montypes for many years and I would have no trouble doing one of them, but it takes quite a few hours to actually paint it properly, and I didn't want to have them sit through watching me paint, so I prepared the plate at home and hoped that it would stay wet for long enough to get it to South Tampa. As it turned out it did stay wet but I also had to soak a couple of my printing papers for quite a long time, and the container of water dumped all over the floor of my car on the way to Tampa. It was soaking wet this morning and I hoped a spray of vinegar would deter the mildew from growing under the passenger seat of my car.

Anyway, the demonstration turned out well and the two types of Monotypes that I had minimal experience with also were fine. One was using water based Createx paint which I had never done before. I actually painted the plate the day before the demonstration and the directions say that you should let it dry completely before printing it. It suffered a bit of damage on the way which I fixed when I got to TRA. The final technique is a traced Monotype which uses water based block printing ink, rolled out on a plate. The paper is then placed carefully over the ink. Not touching the paper at all I set up a "bridge" as a hand rest. The idea is to either make the image on the back of the paper, or tracing over a pre-prepared drawing. In this case I did the latter, and had a drawing on tracing paper that I carefully traced. Then I used a rubber tipped tool to add shading to the drawing. The three examples are below.

Oil Painting Monotype

 Watercolor Monotype

Traced Monotype