On November 7th, WPF Studio presented a special workshop in the technique of trace monotype, taught by our visiting artist Jessica Ann Mills (in town from Omaha, Nebraska just for this class and the opening of On Crossing). It was a fun, relaxing and productive afternoon of drawing, making prints and eating cookies, all bathed in a warm glow of sunshine filtering in the windows of our basement studio on an unseasonably warm November Saturday.
Trace monotype is a technique in which ink is stiffened and rolled out onto a plexiglas slab. The paper is laid face down on this slab and a second sheet of paper is placed on top of that. This paper, a photograph, drawing or a blank sheet on which to draw freehand, acts as a map on which the artist draws with a fine ballpoint pen in order to pick up ink from below onto the print. The stiffness of the ink prevents too much ink from sticking to the paper and making the image messy and blobbed with ink, but a network of smoky, atmospheric ink marks will appear in places where the artist’s hand rests during the drawing process.
Below is a large sheet used by the instructor to create a print. The top image shows the photograph having been traced with ballpoint pen and oil pastels (for a softer, fatter line); the bottom shows the back of the paper, on which traces of ink have been picked up from the slab right through the thin Japanese paper used for the print.
Some of the participants, working on their prints:
Pulling the prints up off the slab to check progress:
In this one you can make out the soft traces of the artist’s hand brushing the paper outside the drawn image.
Some of the finished prints:
On the left is the completed trace monotype; on the right, a print we pulled by running the plexiglas slab through an etching press to pick up a negative image.
The negative image of the print above, printed off the plexiglas slab once the trace monotype was completed.
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