Adding Colored Pencil to a Faint Monoprint Still Life

This is a post from Belinda Del Pesco’s Art Blog Belinda Del Pesco.

Adding Colored Pencil to a Faint Monoprint Still Life

This monoprint was pulled from a construction paper collagraph plate (more on how to make one of those here). I brushed different colored printmaking ink quickly onto the collagraph plate to loosen up a bit and play with color.

The printmaking ink was applied with brushes and felt daubers. You can see the rolled felt daubers in the photo below. Applying different color inks to a printmaking plate is called ‘a la poupee’ – a French printmaking term that means ‘with the doll’. The daubers sometimes look like little dolls. It’s a creative and painterly way to pull a full color print with just one trip through the press.

Collagraph vs Monoprint

Let’s talk about printmaking nomenclature for just a minute. It’s a hot topic, debated with ardent hand waving and speech spittle in print labs, and furious typing in the comments on social media.

A collagraph is usually made from a stiff board with collage-like materials adhered to its surface with glue, and parts of the plate might also be carved or engraved.

Monotype

A monotype is a print made with pigment alone, from a perfectly smooth plate. There is nothing between the plate surface and the pigment. Ink is manipulated with tools or fingertips or both, and the resulting still-wet pigments are transferred from the surface of the plate to paper via pressure. You get one print, hence the root of the term MONO-type.

Monoprint

A monoPRINT is the same concept as the monotype above, except there is some form of repeatable mark in the plate; an adhered shape, or grooved line on the plate that will be marked in every print.

So the plate could be rolled with different colored inks, and the pigments could be manipulated into various compositions before each transfer – but that printable mark on the plate will show up in every print pulled from that plate.

Printmaking Verbiage

Monoprint – as a term in printmaking – is applicable in so many instances, it’s almost an overused catch phrase. The junk drawer of printmaking lingo.

If you used brushes to slather color all over a collagraph plate, a woodblock, and a zinc etching, paying no attention to the shape and linework in each matrix, and you printed each one to paper, what would you call them? They all have a repeatable mark in their matrix, but the paint colors and applications could vary from print to print, like a monoprint.

By definition, they could each be called a monoprint??? BUT, the underlying structure of the plate they were printed from (in my opinion) supersedes the printmaking method.

Maybe I’m a stickler for specificity, but if I were to exhibit the piece featured in this post, I’d label it “Monoprint from a Collagraph Plate”. Let’s spare ourselves an exploration of adding further lingo in the printmaking method realm, such as Intaglio vs Relief vs a la poupee inking methods. And is it an engraving or an etching? Another time, maybe.

Print, Dry, Hand Color Fun

So there you have it. More print layering fun with various wet and dry media, and enough print nomenclature to start a multi-thread argument in the Printmaking Group of your choice. If you’ve never seen it, I’m pinky promising that some folks smack so open palm on their view of print definitions, the comment threads resemble keyboard-fisticuffs.

But that’s not how we roll over here, because we have plates to build, and construction paper to cut, and colors to mix, and paper to soak and blot, and new designs to sketch. Let’s get busy, right?

Thanks for stopping by today, and I’ll see you in the next post -

Belinda

P.S. Here is a similar printmaking method, because the plate is made from paper (a popsicle carton), but the process (brain twister ahead) is closer to intaglio drypoint engraving.

Art Quote

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy. ~Madeleine L’Engle

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