Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Monoprinting

I love monoprinting -  it's easy, fast and gives great visual texture to the surface. I start with 2 pieces of plexiglass, easy to find at chain home improvement stores. You can buy the "leftover" cuts from bigger pieces for next to nothing.
To start: coat the 1 piece with fabric paint and place both pieces together to make a "paint" sandwich (paint on inside).
Pull the 2 pieces apart to see the wonderful patterning -  both pieces can be used for printing.
Place the fabric down and using a brayer, roll over the surface to insure a connection between paint and fabric. You'll see the paint seeping through the fabric, which means you've used enough paint. Let dry and heat set with an iron.
The finished piece - I like the texture created although I think I would have liked a little color on the background so the patterning is more subtle.
You can also print using plastic. The plastic from a dry cleaner bag is best - this was a little heavy.
Put paint down, very haphazardly.
Scrunch the plastic using your hands; this mixes it up. This is where a thinner plastic would have worked better.
The paints are mixed and ready to be lifted off the plastic.
Lay the fabric down and roll over with a brayer. There's a lot of paint seeping through so probably too much paint was laid down initially.
With so much paint, you can try a second print -  not terrific but I can print over this one.
With any of the prints, you can decide whether to use backs or fronts depending on how subtle a look you want.
Another fun technique is to coat a piece of plexiglass with paint and draw designs in it. I used the end of a pencil but any kind of a stylus would work. This was fun and freeing.
Next, lay the fabric on top and run a brayer across the top.
Okay, interesting but again wish I had used a fabric with a little more personality to begin with so this one may be overdyed also.
This next piece was first dyed in a microwave (a designated studio one) and then printed over it.
You can double print - print, let dry and print again.
I really like printing over a printed fabric shown in picture below. I just bought this fabric (on left) and love it.  It was hard to bring myself to print over it (on right) but it is interesting. This might be a good technique for those fabrics in my stash I'm not so enchanted with anymore.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for the wonderful tutorial, Judy. I thought I knew about monoprinting, but, as usual, you have taken it to a new level!

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