Gelli Plate Monotype Prints, RISD Art Professor Demo

materials provided by jelly arts and speedball monotypes a really exciting medium because it's this hybrid between painting and printmaking the definition of a print is that it's an image that can be reproduced multiple times but the funny thing about a monotype is you can only print it once why can you only print it once well the reason is because in traditional printmaking techniques usually it's like a relief or you carve it into something yeah that's really permanent you can keep printing it but with a mono type it's a very slick surface you just paint on it and then once it's printed that's the end of the image oh there's nothing enough by the time you're done and so what I think is exciting about monotype it's just this one-shot deal usually when I'm doing printmaking I go I'll just print another no big deal but with this you only got one chance traditionally monotype is a technique which you need a printmaking press for which is a pain because a lot of people don't have access to a $5,000 printing press in their house yeah which is why when I discovered the gel printing plates I was so excited mmm we have one here from jelly arts and this is a printing plate which will let you make a mono type without impressed this is the gel printing plate and you can see that it's very mushy and very floppy but it's extremely durable yeah no it seems really nice I mean you can put so much pressure that is fine I mean I could just do this although it's just super fun here are some samples of some small monotypes that I made what do you notice about the look of a mono type that's specific to this medium I really love the sort of like painterly textures that you're able to get in mushrooms but I also really enjoy the like subtleties and nuances that are achieved just from like the process of printing on to a sheet of paper it's a really fast approach yeah it's not something that you labor over for hours and hours it's difficult to get detailed because it is very painterly and very gestural but that is also unusual for a printmaking technique because there's lots of printmaking techniques like action braving which are very time-consuming and you have to process the played a billion times and exit an acid this is like white white print you're done in addition to learning the monotype technique we're also going to talk about how to make a series of images that's a question I get a lot from people because I think it's great to learn all different types of techniques and experiment too but at a certain point I think a lot of people feel that they just want to buckle down they want to focus yeah they don't engage with their subject matter more deeply so I'm wondering have you ever worked in a serious before yeah I have the most recent series that I'm just coming off of was a series of larger charcoal drawings and you know I felt although I was able to make you know some of them due to the sheer scale and time that it would take to make I never really achieved the quantity that I wanted and that's I feel like with these monotypes I you can make so many so fast that you you can really explore deeper concepts because you don't have to worry it as much about right individually rendering everything well the process is so fast I know that's to the point where you feel that the image is making itself and from a Productivity point of view that's so useful because that is the danger in a series is that you linger too long yeah on one image that you lose track of the others and so there's a real continuity to making lots of monotypes just over and over and over again that I think is difficult in other media yeah the question becomes okay well how do you make a series because it's a tough balance you want to have enough variety that all the images don't look the same yeah but you also don't want them to be so different that they look like they have nothing to do with each other yeah to me creating a series is like making a really good TV show most of the TV shows that were very successful have some constant for example if you think about the TV show cheers that was set around a bar every episode was in the bar but the thing is in that context almost anything can happen there were so many storylines that they could make up based on that environment and so series are tricky because if things are too much the same they're boring yeah if they're too different then it's all discombobulated and it doesn't make any sense yeah so in this case what I'm going to do the mono type is going to be one of my constants I'm going to only use mono type and I'm gonna do mushrooms for my subject yeah but I'm gonna do different varieties of mushrooms I'm also gonna work monochromatic aliy monochromatic means one color so I'll either do all black or all green Aurel Brown so it's always monochromatic but sometimes a different color yeah so I like having that balance yeah monochromatic prints are also really nice because you can really focus on contrast and value you can certainly mix colors as much as you want for a mono type but I think especially if you're just starting out it's nice to just begin with a monochrome yes traditionally mono types are done with oil-based ink hmm and my first log is oil-based ink yeah nothing beats the deep dark with oil-based ink and also the ink is stiffer it's a lot easier to wipe with and also it captures a lot more detail but the problem with oil-based ink is that it's a nightmare to clean up because you have to use either baby oil or you can use a solvent and then you've got to deal with fumes so if you're working at home and you don't want those fumes you can't use a loyal basting so there's this one brand that I discovered it's called Akua and this is an intaglio ink and it simulates oil-based ink it's not totally the same it's not the same consistency it's still goopy ER but it's pretty close it's really worth it to get this particular ink because it just makes all the difference in the world yeah now with a jolt printing plate you could use any kind of ink you can use water soluble speedball ink you could paint with acrylics on top of it it's a very flexible surface but I just happen to like this ink a lot because it's good for the wiping there's no right way to make a mono type basically any form of putting ink on the gel printing play is a mana type some people like to take a brush and they just paint on it directly the technique that I like to use is a reductive technique where you take a brayer and you roll straight black ink onto the gel printing plate so that it would in theory print pure black and then I take a cotton rag and I white way to create highlights mmm it's great because you're working from this foundation of black everything is covered you don't feel like you can mess up so it's a great way to get started you're gonna take just a little piece of cardboard like this and you just spread out ink on a sheet of Plexiglas and I'm surprised you need a lot of ink together the black which is so different than traditional printmaking because usually with traditional printmaking if they're using a press yeah I want to use very little ink because of the pressure mm-hmm this has no press so you need much much more ink than usual so you take the prayer like this you can hear that sticky sound yeah I'm looking for so that's a pretty good yeah do you see the texture yeah you'll notice that when you get the gel printing plate there's gonna be two sheets of plastic attached to it I like to keep the plastic on the back because the gel printing plate it's very sticky and so if I take off both sides and sticks to everything yeah what I do is I just take off the top piece like that keep that on the back and then I can roll up mmm like this you'll notice also that I have a light board you can see with the light you can really tell how much ink is on there if I turn it off you can't tell ya know it looks black yeah exactly so it's not the end of the world if you don't have a light board but it makes your life so much that it's really off it and it doesn't have to be a fancy light board it can be something pretty simple I know this that you're going back and forth and you always go forward and then you go horizontal is there any reason that you're doing that well because sometimes the brayer gets very streaky hmm and so if you keep moving in different directions it tends to come out a lot more even yeah okay are there any effects that you can get for applying less or more ink to the gel printing plate definitely I mean if you want to deliberately make it like a light gray tone you can certainly do that so this is just the way I happen to work but people can roll half the play you can roll a portion of it it's really very flexible in terms of the tools that you can use on a mono type you can use anything I mean if you wanted to just smear your pans across this you could do that yeah or you can even press textures into the gel printing Wow so you could take like cheesecloth and precedent it would make a textured pattern but what I really like is using a cotton rag because this is very painterly and you can remove highlights you can also use brushes so brushes are good if you want to go in and change the direction of the stroke or if you want to add more page you can even go back in with the brayer and say you add an area you don't like you just go over it and then you've done yeah are there any like specific types of brushes that you would recommend using with this is this easier to clean off as there like would you use a lower quality brush or I mean I like to use these bristle brushes that you usually use for oil paint because they're stiff and they're gonna be able to take the stiffness of the ink okay like I wouldn't use watercolor brushes yeah very soft I'm not gonna work well the way I like to get started is to just take a thin brush and just lightly paint out the basic outline of what I am taking in this case it's mushrooms it's a little bit hard to see at first but it's just an approximation you can change it it's not difficult to do so I'm gonna just start out getting the basic outline of these shapes and again if you don't like it just take the roller start from scratch it's awesome very very flexible material what sort of pressure would you recommend for this stage of the process like how should you be holding your brush you can press as hard as you want or as light as you want because the gel printing plates are super durable to my knowledge I have never ripped or torn one ever Wow it's not a problem really I happen to like starting with the brightest highlights because it helps me just gauge what the level of contrast is because I definitely want to put in some more subtle grays yeah but the whites are sort of the most obvious things so I find it easier to just start with yeah it's similar to a charcoal drawing it is if you want to say tone the paper with line charcoal and then add and remove it's it's really fun I also think it's important when you're doing a mono type to consider the direction of your stroke like if you go this way if you go up and down if you pull it that way those are all important considerations yeah totally and if you were to make a mistake you would just troll over it no problem because monotype can only be printed once it is really worth it to measure out the paper get a nice clean border around it and to do a registration sheet this rectangle is the size of the gel printing plate yep and then this outline here is the size of the paper you'll also notice that I have a sheet of acetate over this yeah because if I get any ink on this it's really easy to get rid of okay so we're just gonna put this right in the middle you want to lower it down so that the corners of the paper match the corners of the registration shoes otherwise I'm looking for good okay so I'm gonna line up those corners just put it down like that okay and now you're gonna just rub really gently across the back you have to be very careful because if you rub it too fast sometimes the paper will slip yeah what I do sometimes is I'll just take a little peak and just see how it's printing you can see it's got a nice black background there it is so it's always interesting to see how different the images yeah then what you anticipated because I actually thought a lot of this was a lot darker but I guess I removed a lot more than I thought you can see now the image is gone if I judge of print nothing would happen if you want to do another print and you're using the same color you don't have to wash this you can just take your brayer and just start inking it up again yeah however if you do want to do a new color I have found that baby wipes are actually the best thing to do these gel printing plates because they're nice and moist and they clean really really easy yeah oh my god yeah cuz you know one time so nicely I took a paper towel and I made it wet and I assumed that would be fine but it didn't work as well as the baby fly oh my god here as well there's a little bit of ink so it's important to clean the registration sheet as well and then if I were to say be done printing for the day you need to take your plexiglass you need to take your brayer and you have to wash them really well with soap and water this Akua ink it's water-soluble but it's really stubborn to get well so you really have to like scrub it use a lot of water in the beginning you're gonna feel like it's not coming off but it will eventually if you're a person we're ready to make a second image what do you think we could do with the mushrooms to make them similar but different I was thinking of maybe changing the orientation of the mushrooms so instead of them being sort of upwards what if we flip them around like this maybe you would look at it a little bit differently and it would look a little bit more sort of obscure and abstract and you wouldn't really see the mushroom as much and maybe we can add a few as well maybe like some of these smaller ones as well that that looks good we're gonna do phthalo green which is a really intense green you'll find that there are some colors that are not so good for this because they have a very limited range but phthalo green almost looks black if you use enough of it it's very very intense if you have a really big plate like this one sometimes I just go right and the gentle printing play like if it's obvious I'm definitely gonna need more I can just do this but obviously here you have a little bit more control it's so beautiful isn't it but see this isn't even as dark as I need it it's got to be way way darker than that same thing we're gonna get the registration sheets and stick it in the middle briefs bfk goes on top like this different colors will print differently because some are goofier some are stiffer than others so you never really know what you're gonna get but I happen to like the spontaneous nature of this material because I'm not somebody who's very spontaneous with my artwork yes I'd like to plan a lot I like to do lots of sketches so the monotype medium for me is an excuse yeah really wild and spontaneous and not care about the results and I find it very refreshing now I know this way to just create work very quickly and very effectively and I feel like this is such a nice gauge into printmaking because it's so forgiving like I don't know I feel like now I know something about printmaking and I feel I would feel comfortable going home and like trying this myself overall I just feel like I have this new gateway into a different type of making now so again so excited to learn about the I like to use a cotton let's try that again yeah that's either okay let's try [Music]

Channel: Art Prof: Create & Critique

Views: 42,399

Rating: 4.9437342 out of 5

Keywords: monoprinting without a press, gelli plate, gelli plate techniques, gelli plate printing, gelli plate tutorial, gelli plate tutorial for beginners, gelli plate for beginners, gelli plate printing techniques, gelli plate monoprinting, monoprinting, gelli printing, gelli plates, gel plates, gelli plate tutorials youtube, gelli plate printing tutorials, gelli plate printing videos, gelli plate monoprinting youtube, gelli plate printing ideas, gel printing

Id: 6Li320HKnuU

Length: 17min 22sec (1042 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 21 2018