Response to Artists Talk, Monotypes

I went to an artist talk/panel on developing skills for creating monotypes. I had never created a monotype till then and was very intrigued by the way you actually create one. So pretty much you take any size of Plexiglas and round off the corners. Then you bevel the edges with a rough file at a forty-five degree angle. Then you start painting the image you want displayed on the Plexiglas. However, you paint the highlights on first and all the darker colors on last. So really, you are painting a picture backwards (compared to painting something directly on canvas). Furthermore, the more color you put on the Plexiglas, the better the final product will look. After you complete painting the picture, you soak a piece of print-paper in water for ten minutes or so. Afterwards, you dry with a towel and rub it slightly to remove its sheen. You then place the paper on the Plexiglas so that the paint seeps into the paper. With a rolling pin, you then press down on the Plexiglas so that the paper takes in all the paint; however, you do not want to rub the Plexiglas and paper together so that you would smear the colors and layers of paint. Lastly, you can take a wooden spoon and burnish the paper. By doing this the paint from the Plexiglas gets displaced onto the paper, which is your final product. The image looks quite unique compared to other methods of painting and you cannot replicate that same image twice. Conversely, with the left over paint on the Plexiglas, you could make a ghost copy of the image. To do this you simply soak another piece of paper and displace the leftover paint on it using the proper technique mentioned above. This image will look slightly like the original version but lighter, hence it’s ghost copy. All in all, this artist talk/panel on creating monotypes was very intriguing. She mentioned that there was a difference between monotyping and monoprinting but still did not comprehend what was the difference after her lecture.