Make Monotypes 1

This is the first week of the Make Monotypes class with Linda Germain. Till now I like it very much. It brings nice surprises. Here is my latest experiment: 'hello, dear moon'.

The first day we had to make a gel plate with glycerine and gelatine. Products I only know by name, but have never worked with. It was quite an experiment to make it. At first I thought: maybe I can skip that part of the lesson, but now I know it's an essential part of the course.

The second day we were asked to gather all kind of 'stamp' materials. With textures on it like stripes,  bubbles, smooth and rough surfaces etc. And make shapes. To keep it simple we only chose one shape. I chose the half circle and made many (way to much ;-)) shapes.

The third day we did  a warm up exercise. During about 20 minutes you follow Linda's  voice on the video and print along. It's fun, but also hard work. I had big red cheeks during the process :-)

It's an exercise to learn  and understand the terms and principles of this gel plate monotype printing. Without thinking to much or judging yourself.

You get two versions of one lay out. First you ink the plate, put some stamps on it and make a 'shape impression'  After that you remove the stamps and print a detail impression. Here is one example of the prints I made:

Now I understand why you need a gel plate. You give pressure on the paper, so that the gel plate moves along under your hands, because it's flexible. So you can see ALL the textures of the stamps in detail. Really fascinating!

The two versions are totally different from each other. It needs much more practice to understand what's happening exactly, but that's one of the reasons why I took this class.

I scanned the detailed impression and edit it in Photopshop. These creatures appeared:

Here's another experiment. It's from a one color monoprint which I played with in Photoshop. I posted it on Facebook and a few people thought it was the Pope! "Bedankt fur die Blüme",  he always says with Easter in Dutch. So here's the Pope amongst his flowers :)

This was only a part of the first week. I'm looking forward to learn much more!
Will be continued!