What is a Light Field Monotype?
Monotypes are a hybrid between painting and printmaking. The name monotype has the root “mono” meaning one. Monotype printmaking results in a single image.
These beautiful prints cannot be printed in quantity or an edition, like other, repeatable printmaking methods (woodcuts, etchings, etc.).
Light Field Monotypes are painted or drawn with oil paint, printmaking ink, water-based paint, or other transferable media on the surface of a smooth, un-etched plate. The ‘Light Field’ refers to a clean plate; you start with an open, unpainted, light field, and you add pigment to it. Your image is made with pigment alone, and that manipulated pigment is pressed from the plate to a sheet of paper.
You can print on an etching press, or by hand with a baren or some other rubbing tool, like a spoon or even your fingers. The transfer process results in one, unique, painterly print.
Light Field and Dark Field Monotypes – What is the Difference?
A Dark Field Monotype begins with the same smooth plate, but the entire surface is coated with pigment at the start.
Most dark field monotypes begin with a thin, smooth layer of printmaking ink, applied with a brayer to cover the entire plate, like this. The desired image is wiped from the ink in a subtractive process, as though you are “carving light” into the ink.
Since the plate, or the “field” you are starting from in a dark field monotype is coated completely, it’s called a Dark Field Monotype. But let’s get back to our light field version….
Light Field Monotype Variations
With so many variables in monotype printmaking, it’s helpful to read about the process, or get a little help to guide your creative success. (I’ll be adding a course to my online school soon.)
The monotype in this post has a plexiglass plate treated beforehand to help watercolor stick to the slippery surface. Without that step, the watercolor would simply bead and roll away from passages it was meant to cover.
Textural elements were added to the plate with water-soluble crayons. Some brands transfer better than others, so be sure to experiment. The printmaking plate can be a sheet of plexiglass, metal, polyester film, Yupo paper, or Gelli plate, etc.
Printmaking papers vary enormously. Finding the best brand, weight and type of paper to use if you’re printing by hand, versus printing on a press makes a big difference. (Smoother – not a lot of texture or “tooth”, and more pliable is better for hand transfer.)
You’ll also want the right paper to layer watercolors from a plexiglass plate, and then add colored pencil on top of the print after it’s dry.
Light Field Monotype Classes
Can I tempt you to learn how to make art with this painterly, flexible printmaking method? You won’t need a press, or even drawing skills with some of these methods! You can get notified when my online Monotype course is published. Here is the Let Me Know list where you can sign up. You’ll get a note as soon as the course is posted.
Who Wants to Make a Monotype?
Monotypes are so much fun! I think everyone should know how to make one. I’m excited to share the infinitely varied methods of monotype with you! Artists can transfer a dark field monotype as a single pigment image all at once. Or you can paint the plate and print in full color. You can also print each color in separate, layered sequences… It goes on and on!
While drafting descriptions of the online classes I want to build for monotypes, I filled too many pages in a notebook. I had to stop at 20 methods, so I could get to work and start filming! I can’t wait to share these courses with you!
In the meantime, here is a link to a light field monotype tutorial of a still life. This version was made from a sheet of polyester drafting film for the plate.
I hope you’ll give this painterly printmaking method a go. If you’ve made a light field monotype, and you know resources to help beginners, please share links in the comments.
Thanks for stopping in to say hello, and I’ll see you in the next post!
Belinda
P.S. If you’re new around here (hi!), you can sign up to get each new post via email over yonder.
P.P.S. This is the last week to take advantage of 24% off my online course How to Title Your Art. Here is the discount link: Check it out here.
Art Quote
There is no way of explaining the Italian fondness for form and color other than by considering the necessities of the people and the artistic character of the Italian mind. Art in all its phases was not only an adornment but a necessity of Christian civilization. The Church taught people by sculpture, mosaic, miniature, and fresco. It was an object-teaching, a grasping of ideas by forms seen in the mind, not a presenting of abstract ideas as in literature. Printing was not known. There were few manuscripts, and the majority of people could not read. Ideas came to them for centuries through form and color, until at last the Italian mind took on a plastic and pictorial character. It saw things in symbolic figures, and when the Renaissance came and art took the lead as one of its strongest expressions, painting was but the color-thought and form-language of the people. And these people, by reason of their peculiar education, were an exacting people, knowing what was good and demanding it from the artists. Every Italian was, in a way, an art critic, because every church in Italy was an art school. The artists may have led the people, but the people spurred on the artists, and so the Italian mind went on developing and unfolding until at last it produced the great art of the Renaissance.
A Text-Book of the History of Painting, by John C. Van Dyke, 1894
Quick Supply List for Monotype Prints made from Plastic Food Containers
If you're planing to make a monotype print using re-purposed plastic from food containers, this list will help you gather the supplies. This monotype video tutorial of the process will help you visualize the steps to get your first monotype made, without a printing press!
If you think printmaking is going to sweep you off your feet in a love affair of art-making (like it did with me), do yourself a favor and get some good ink. This Cranfield Caligo Safe Wash ink has an excellent pigment load, a great workable consistency, it dries slowly, so you have plenty of working time, it transfers well, it cleans up with soap and water, and it dries permanent so you can paint your print with watercolor if you want.
If you're going to make a monotype with standard acrylic paint, you'll want to slow the drying time to give yourself room to move the pigment around on the plate. A few drops of this Slow-Dri Fluid Retarder in your traditional acrylic paint will slow the drying process, and give you more time to work your monotype image.
These compressed paper blending stomps are traditionally used with graphite, charcoal and pastel to push dry pigment into paper, and blend soft edges. In monotypes, they work beautifully to push ink or pigments around as a drawing tool, or a wet-ink plowing to clear areas, or leave textures
Use these cotton swabs to clear ink (with the rounded tip) and leave narrow marks, or sculpt details into the pigment (with the pointed tips). There's one style of each tip (a pointed and a rounded) on every swab.
Use this spray bottle in your studio to lightly moisten your printmaking paper before pressing it to your inked plate, add a veil of mist water to the dried paint on your palette to re-wet pigments, increase moisture in watercolor on your palette, or spritz watercolor paper to stretch it on a board.
Trim plastic from your produce and baked goods containers to create printmaking plates. Cut the tops off your cookie containers, trim the base off fruit boxes, and clip report covers or drafting mylar into small printmaking plates.
The top of this cookie container was the first plastic square I clipped to create a drypoint print. The plastic is smooth and sturdy, and the print size on this one finished at about 2.75" x4 2.75" square. I've made drypoint engravings and monotypes from all the Trader Joe's biscotti containers I've 'collected' since then. 🙂
I use this tool a lot on monotype printmaking projects. The chisel tip and pointed tip are two of my most used tools, since I draw into the ink with one, and clear/push the ink around with the other. They move smoothly through both printmaking ink and acrylic paint, and leave a clean plow mark in the pigments.
If you decide to try making a drypoint engraving, or etching into the plastic from your produce and baked goods containers, this is your tool. It's a stainless scribe that will let you leave drawn lines, or deeply engraved crosshatching in the plastic. This stainless scribe has been used throughout art history to make drypoints and etchings.
This is a slow-drying acrylic paint that will dry permanent. It doesn't give you quite the same amount of time to work the pigment as printmaking ink, and it is not the same consistency or transfer qualities, but if you think you would also like to paint with acrylics, it's a good start to make monotypes.
I've used this printmaking paper torn down to match the size of my monotype plates throughout many of the video tutorials in my courses at BelindaTips.com. It's bright white, holds up to ink or acrylic very well, it's light enough for hand transfer (or press transfer) and takes other media like watercolor and colored pencil on top of the print beautifully.
You can never have enough brayers. Especially of you want to get into printing in multiple colors. This is a good starter set, and either will work very well to roll either printmaking ink or acrylic paint onto your plate to make a monotype print.
This is a great starter set of paint brushes that will work with both acrylic and watercolor. You can also use it to create marks in your printmaking inks, or acrylics rolled out on the plate. You'll see in the video tutorial that I use the flat brush to both apply the paint to the plate, and then move, make marks, lighten and moisten the pigments. I used the same brushes to add watercolor to the print afterwards.
I'm on my third box of these watercolors. They are affordable, good quality, student grade, excellent pigment load, and they come in a tiny palette box so you can take them out in the garden or on a trip somewhere to paint watercolor studies after you hand color some of your monotype prints.
Once you try a little colored pencil on a monotype, you'll be pulling out every print you've ever made to reconsider their potential. You can do the same thing to your watercolors. Working with colored pencil on monotypes lets you experiment with adding detail, and informs your next prints with knowledge related to what you can afford to leave out, and what you must be sure to add in.
B. I’m specially taken with the beautiful textures you achieved with this process! Very intriguing. I keep looking deeper. Love it.
Dear Didi, Thank you for the compliment. I think you’d love this process, and perhaps we should reserve the next art-date for a go at it?
Beautiful piece Belinda. I look forward to your posts. It’s been a while since I made some monotypes. Your piece has spurred me on. Thank you.
Ujwala! Thank you for your compliments! I’m so glad you feel inspired to create another monotype! I’ve been totally enjoying your portrait posts on instagram! Keep them coming!