Monoprints

These are plastic templates I cut with my cricut expression from the CTMH cricut Artbooking cartridge.  They are dirty because I have been monoprinting with my Hectograph that I made back in July.  To make these templates, I used plastic pocket folders that I got for 30cents each with back to school sales.  That tip I learned from Lindsay at "the Frugal Crafter" on youtube. 

One side is shiny, the other matte.  I saved the scraps and used them as window accents in my recent Halloween-mini-book.

Here is a really good cricut tip:  cricut image direction.  She expains how to know which direction an image will cut on your mat.  I put a piece of tape on my cricut to remind me.  Glamorous?  Fashionable? No, not even remotely.   Practical, you betcha!

The arrow of green painters tape on the handbook shows you the 6" x 12" overlays are in different orientations (vertical and horizontal).

So here are my monoprints!  I was so excited to finally try these.  In about an hour, with a modest selection of cheap inexpensive acrylic paint I got on sale at Michaels, (50 cents each, a real score!), I went with the recomended 4-7 colours, and played with a brayer and wasted printer paper.  Here is a fun video showing how to do it Gelli plate monoprinting layers.  I kept it simple with these, but some of the uglier less pretty pages can get overprinted later to get more visually complex.  That's where some real art comes in.

I have a stack of blank school-work that a certain teenager generates.  Well, the school doles them out, he just leaves a lot of them blank.  They are begging to get monoprinted, and will be even more interesting with the assignment questions and various doodles that did get done.  I will show you in another post what I've done with these papers.

Playing with supplies, it does my art happy!