Great Aping

A week ago I went to a Watercolour Monotype Printmaking Workshop hosted by a great local artist/musician/craftster/all-round-nice-gal Sarah Hallman. A local group called Les Ateliers organized it.

It was a really fun afternoon. Kudos to all.

Just before leaving my house to go to Sarah's I became totally intimidated at having to come up with an image on the spot surrounded by a bunch of strangers so I quickly swiped a few sheets of reference material from my desk and stuffed them in my purse.  The sheets happened to contain several variations of traditional-tattoo-style Great Apes (because I'd been thinking of painting one soon)... so that's what I ended up making a print of. 

After the initial printing at Sarah's I applied several more layers/styles of "printing" to my ape before feeling happy enough that I put it in a cheap Ikea "Ribba" frame and added it to the "Ribba-Framed Print Gallery" in my kitchen. 

Here's the progress. 

First I loosely drew the ape's face on the paper to be printed:

This is the plate, covered in Gum Arabic and watercolours. Unfortunately I didn't logic-out the fact that I should have reversed the watercolours in order to register them with the drawing. My bad.

Since the drawing and printed colour were so misaligned due to my oversight, I worked into the print with more watercolour. This was the state of things when I left Sarah's that day:

After pondering whether to stash my monster-piece in the closet or the garbage can I ultimately decided to experiment further on it and see what I could do:

- I used a stencil and silkscreen to screen the dark grey hair and pupils,
- the "R" is an old, wooden letterpress letter I have kicking around,
- used masking tape and a lino-roller to add bits of pink and yellow to the background,
- painted into the mouth area,
- used an old eraser to "print" the pink muzzle dots...

I think that's all... This is what I ended up with:

So... after playing around with it throughout the week I liked my ape enough to frame it and hang it in my kitchen (at least for a little while - for the memories of the day and of trying something different).

(I guess I made an "in-between-print" instead of an "in-between-painting" this week...)

Here it is on the wall:

This is only part of the kitchen's  "Ribba Print Gallery"... it continues on another wall.

The closest one (the cat) is a print by Canadian printmaker and graphic novelist Laurence Hyde that I found in the basement of my building!! (It was in an old, falling-apart frame.)

Speaking of cats, here's a (very) little illustration I did recently for an American publication inspired by my own luxuriating cats... just to give you an idea of what my commercial work looks like - in contrast to the Great Ape print.

OK. Thanks again to the hosts of the printing-party and thanks to whoever made it all the way through this post to read this line. I appreciated your eyeballs.