Leaf detail

I spent some time on the weekend scanning all of the flower prints that I have done so far and I was amazed at how much detail has been 'captured' in each of the prints, I know that quite a lot of detail can be seen in the pictures of the prints that I have posted and of course when you look at the actual print itself, but the process of scanning has illuminated (I suppose you could say) the littlest of details within the prints.

The image below to me resembles a road map, a very complex one at that.

The prints of the sage leaves below looks like the leaf is made up of little circles or bubbles.

How I print pressed flowers

I know printing pressed flowers is pretty easy, after all you need is some pressed flowers, ink and paper and your ready to go, but it can be very time consuming as the flowers are very delicate and they only tend to last for 3 or 4 prints (if your lucky). I've tried a couple of different ways of printing the flowers, first of all I tried gently pressing the flower onto the roller to apply the ink and secondly I tried gently applying the ink using a paint brush, (however the hairs on the brushes ended up pulling at the flowers).

The method that I found works best is to just apply the flower straight onto the ink try and gently pat the flower so that it gets a some what even coverage of ink and the gently pull it of the tray and place it onto the paper.

Place the flower onto the ink tray

Gently press the flower into the ink

Peel the flower off the tray trying not the rip the flower

Place the flower onto the card/paper

Cover the flower with a scrap piece of paper and then either rub over it with your hand or use a roller to roll of the flower to create the print

Remove the paper and the flower and you are left with a print of the flower

It normally take a few attempts at getting the print to look how you want it, for example in this print you can see that there id slightly too much ink on some of the petals, so for the next print I just printed straight from the flower with what ever ink was left instead of apply anymore.

Printed Flowers #3

This is going to be the last of the printed flowers for a while, I have used up a lot of the flowers I had pressed and as it is coming into autumn and winter a lot of the flowers now are starting to die off and I want to start taking this project forward. (Though I do have some leaves that I have still yet to print). I will continue to look for some more flowers to print over the next few months but for now these are the final flower monoprints.

It's clear from the prints that I have done that fuchsia's print the best, I think that because it's a larger flower than the others it was easier to apply a couple of coats of ink without the flower breaking really quickly and it's the one flower that I feel printed with the most amount of detail.

Monoprinting home set-up

I know that a monoprinting set-up isn't as complex as a screen printing set up, but I thought I would share with you my home set-up for monoprinting.

first thing on the list is ink, I use an oil based ink for monoprinting and I also mix my own ink by using a mixture of oil paint and block printing medium. I got the Caligo safe wash ink from the intaglio printmaker website and the printing medium is from hobbycraft.

below is block printing medium, you can add this to oil paint to create an oil ink to print with.

Next is Rollers, at the moment I just have 2 plastic rollers (which do the job for now) they were both inexpensive and they are the ones that you typically find in schools, but I'm aiming to get some proper rollers in the next few weeks to replace these ones.

Ink tray, does what it say on the tin, a tray to roll out the ink.

Extras - Lino, obviously for when I want to do lino printing. I have a mixture of different types of lino from proper lino (the one with the mesh back), floor lino and easy cut lino (the stuff that looks like rubber), out of all these I prefer the easy cut to cut as you don't have to worry about warming the lino up first although the proper lino I find gives a better print than the easy cut lino.

Printed Flowers # 2

Here are the second batch of prints I have done with pressed flowers and leaves.

I think the next thing I'm going to try out with these prints is to see how they transfer onto a silkscreen and also see how they look at a larger size. Each of the prints that I have produced are about A6 in size and with some of the flowers being soo small I can fit about 2 or 3 prints onto an A6 piece of card, so it will be interesting to see how they will look at A5 or A4 size maybe even up to A3.

Pressed flower Prints

As I mentioned in a previous post I decided to have a go at pressing and printing flowers, below are examples of my first prints using the pressed flower. 

It wasn't easy trying to print with pressed flowers because they are soo delicate once they've been pressed I found that the broke very easily so I only managed to get about 3 or 4 prints from each flower. The prints came out a lot better than I thought and I was surprised with how much detail is visible in some of the prints.