The Malham Tree

Good to learn how you did this

I live in the Welsh borders, and I really enjoy the art courses put on by Westhope College (near Craven Arms) when we aren't in lockdown. I did a Mixed Media course there 3 or 4 years ago run by a local artist, Claire Linford, which included this mono printing technique (ie. inking the back of a sheet of acetate with water soluble printing ink and then drawing freehand with the end of a pencil or your finger onto the clean side of the acetate, transferring the image onto the paper behind). I enjoyed this technique so much that I've continued to experiment with it at home. This sort of mono printing is easier than lino printing and some other printing techniques because you don't reverse the image - but it is also fast, messy and the results are totally unpredictable, so I usually end up binning about 80% of the output from each mono printing session! I was pushing beyond the boundaries of what I learned on the course here, working back into my initial black mono print by re-wetting the ink and moving it around with a flat watercolour brush to pick out the furrows and fissures in the limestone pavement. I added all the colour afterwards, working quickly with a very inexpensive set of watercolour brush pens. You can also add colour with chalk pastels, which behave very differently - and mono print with found objects - for example, by inking the back of autumn leaves and printing the patterns made by the veins directly onto mixed media paper.