Watercolor Monotype Portrait from a Drafting Film Plate

When I pulled the watercolor monotype portrait – I understood why Priscilla suggested coating the mylar first with Gum Arabic as a release agent.

I will do that on the next mylar monotype, since so much of the pigment stayed on the plate (right side of the image above).

I had to use Dawn dish soap and a scrubber to get the dried pigments off the mylar, but this could be a result of the Flying-by-the-Seat-of-my-Pants-Chemistry I’m dancing with, by mixing Akua Inks and Caran D’Ache crayons.

To make up for the left-behind pigments, I added watercolor to the monotype to increase the contrast in a few areas, but the watery, painterly, loose patterns in the print are very appealing to me, and I’ll be doing more of them this week.

One evening, Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) was dining with me and some friends.  Among the latter was a young lady recently married, who related to us an account of the furnishing of her house. All the rooms were finished except the dining room; for this last, her husband could not, for the moment, give her the money, and she was compelled to hold her little receptions in her sleeping room. After dinner, Rosa asked me for a large sheet of drawing paper, and while we were talking and she herself smoking a cigarette, she sketched a delightful hunting scene, which she signed with her full name. Then, under cover of a general conversation on music, as tea was being served, she approached the young wife and said to her: “Take this picture to (Benjamin) Todesco, on your return to Paris, and he will give you at least fifteen hundred francs for it. Then, you will be able to furnish your drawing room.”

~French Landscape painter, Joseph Verdier writing about his friend, the painter Rosa Bonheur