roller
Mono-Printing Workshop
Hi everyone! 
So last Wednesday I had a mono-printing workshop; it was a little workshop for everyone to learn how to use the space and how to make mono-prints. To make a mono-print you need to place a small amount of print ink onto a flat surface (a sheet of metal is best, a surface with ins’t your desk), you then use a roller to spread the ink into a thin layer in the shape of a small square, roughly a bit larger than an A4 sheet of paper; this is your ink-well prepped. To prep your work surface, you need to set out the paper you’re using into an easy to access pile. Have any tools easy to access too, as you don’t want to be looking through drawers with inky hands. Once your work space is set, grab a new clean roller, roll over your ink-well, and roll over another flat surface (like before, not your desk space. You want a surface you can move to a sink to clean. Depending on the ink you use, it could be hard to remove it from the surface). Once you’ve prepped your printing surface, place a scrap piece of paper onto the ink and lightly rub the paper. This is to remove any excess ink; to prevent your work being too inky. Lift the page and place a clean piece onto the surface.
At this point, it’s your decision on what you do. You can draw onto the page of the paper and the ink will pick it up on the other side as a mirror image. You can use any item to make an impression onto the page, your hand, a pen, a toothbrush, etc. When you have drawn your image, peel the paper off the ink, the image you have drawn will be on the other side of the paper. At this point, you could place another piece of paper on to the image and make a series of mono-prints. If your image comes out too faded, you need to roll your roller in to the ink-well, and roll a new layer of ink onto your work surface, and repeat the process.
For the workshop I had to make a couple of prints to learn how the ink would appear onto the page. After that we were told to try and make images using the process. The first image is my practice piece. The rest of the images are my work pieces. I aimed for a cosmic look, and I believe a few turned out the way I wanted.
Enjoy.
Railston Artworks 