So, here I pressed marks onto the back of a sheet of paper while it lay on an inked up plate a number of times to create a portrait. For each sheet, I drew my head and shoulders based on the pen sketch self-portrait shown in the first image below.
Below is my first attempt at a mono print using the transfer method and using the above sketch as a model. I drew onto the paper free hand using the end of a brush handle and an opened out paperclip. The result is quite a scary, eerie image, with one semi luminous eye glaring from a shadowy face. I nicknamed it ‘the scary monk’.
It’s not a beautiful drawing but it was quite a surprising and interesting result I think. The mark making felt semi blind and had echoes of the blind contour drawing exercise in unit one of this course, both the process and the result. The unpredictability of this method means that it might be possible to generate interesting images, that perhaps I would not have been brave or able enough to make if I had been drawing to the rules and keeping tight control on what I was observing. So there is an element of accidental invention here, which is quite fun and something to explore further.
At the time though I was disappointed with the above first attempt. I wanted something recognisably more portrait like. So, I tried controlling the process, by drawing on one side of a loose A4 sheet and then pressing onto that while it was lying on an inked up plate – here is the initial drawing.
…and below is the disastrous result. I basically used too much ink I think as I was careful not to press on areas I did not make marks on.
I don’t think I’d really got that I’d used too much ink at this point. I tried this time drawing with pencil onto paper directly overlaying an inked up plate. Here’s the drawing – it’s quite a naive, loosely based on the very first pen sketch above. I think part of the coarseness of it was an attempt not to draw lines to close together so that they would come across as separate lines on the printed side.
Here is the printed version on the reverse side. Okay, it replicated the drawing quite well, but it loses the element of surprise possible with this method and felt a bit like painting by numbers or doing a brass rubbing. What effect was achieved otherwise? I suppose interesting texture across and around the face created by traces of ink. But otherwise I was dissatisfied, and wanted to have another go at freer mark making without the aid of a pencil.
I tried creating a portrait from the initial pen sketch again using different tools including now a polished stone. Most of the attempts just came out as dark sploggy messes with no discernible portrait, so I threw those away – the following was the only one where there was someone recognisably human in the picture. But this particular attempt produced a useful discovery for me. I was becoming frustrated with the very dark, blacked out sheets being produced, so I decided when creating the version below, to create it using the plate just after creating another mono print on it. The earlier mono print had used up a lot of the ink. When I came to make the attempt below, the marks I made left more meaningful overall impressions, rather than one merged mass of black.
The final attempt below was again done by overlaying the paper on a previously inked up plate that had already been used for another print. I made quite hard definite marks with the brush handle and I think the result was again quite interesting, this time the image of a thin old man emerged rather than the heavy set characters that came out in the earlier prints above.
I think I would like to have another go at producing portraits using the transfer method later this week. I’ll experiment with either applying a very thin layer of ink (I think I was putting just too much on before) or inking up the plate and then overlaying that with newspaper perhaps, rolling over that and pealing off to remove the excess ink and then laying down my drawing paper onto the plate to begin the mark making.
Kris' Art Learning Log 