Week One Arts Pathways

Drawing & Printmaking

This is the part of the course that I've been looking forward to.

On our first week, our teacher introduced the class to contour drawing & monotype printmaking.

What is contour drawing?

Contour drawing is essentially outline drawing, and blind contour drawing means drawing the outline of the subject without looking at the paper. The end result doesn't matter - what is important is carefully observing the subject.
Retrieved from http://drawsketch.about.com/cs/drawinglessons/a/contourblind.htm. 12/3/2007.

What is a monotype?

A monotype is a unique work of art usually printed from a smooth flat surface such as a sheet of plastic. The artist paints by hand the image to be printed directly on this smooth surface and then places a sheet of paper over the freshly painted surface, cranks it through a press, and so creates a one-of-a-kind work of art. Monotypes, by their nature, cannot be produced as an edition. If they are numbered at all they are numbered as 1/1 (read as "one of one"... an edition of one, in other words).
Retrieved from http://www.studio1617.com/prints.htm. 12/3/2007.

We used several different techniques.

Essentially we used a 6" soft speedball roller to apply the water soluable ink to a soft piece of printmaking lino, laid a A4 sheet of paper on top and proceeded to do a contour drawing, of leaves, on the back of what would be our print.

Fig. 1

This is what my first print looked like on the back.

Fig. 2

This is the result. As you can see, after drawing the outline, I used various implements to smudge and darken various areas. The wavy lines were created using a wide tooth comb.

Fig. 3

This print was done straight after the print in Fig. 2. It is a negative of that print. If you look carefully you will see that the light areas are where there was little or no ink left on the lino piece and the darker areas are lighter in the original.

The following are more examples of the process used above.


Fig. 4

The contour drawing.



Fig. 5

The original print.


Fig. 6

The negative print.