The idea
In the beginning there was the idea to reprint plants and to weave a story into the resulting botanical leaves. In collaboration with the Berlin author and filmmaker Andreas Strozyk, who wrote a wonderful story for me, I developed illustrations about a bear that slips into a summer dress.
The technique
Monotype is a simple and accessible technique that allows me to add interesting textures to large areas. Using paint rollers, stamps or palette knives, I will apply paint to a Gelli-plate and press paper onto it to create my own unique illustrations.
On this created background, I add more figures and drawings using mixed media, finally a graphic with great density is created.
Since forest is the theme of my story, the technique is very fitting. For the backgrounds, I collected leaves, plants and structures from my surroundings and used them to create a large background. For the animals of the story, I experimented with brush-structures for the fur. Since the technique is too random, I decided to glue the pages with the animals in the forest onto the paper as collage elements. Because you can’t predict exactly how the result will be and whether it might destroy the elements already on the page.
For the colours I used Intaglio inks from Cranfield. But the result on simple drawing paper did not convince me, the colours smear very much and in connection with black the look becomes dirty.
Based on this fact, I switched back to acrylic inks. According to YouTube tutorials, these are the colours that are most commonly used for Gelli-printing. However, I noticed that it is not so easy to draw on them afterwards, because acrylics act like a plastic layer and are repellent to coloured pencils and inks.
To make the print workable, I painted it with a light glaze of matt acrylic paint, thus giving the paper a fine grain on which the crayons could now stick. After mounting the elements on the sheet, I continued working with coloured pencils, acrylic markers and watercolours. I scanned the result of the collages and will prepare them for the text pages of the Gecko children’s magazine.
I am especially pleased that the children’s magazine Gecko will print the bear story in 2024, so it remains exciting!
This project was funded in 2023 as part of the “Kultur ans Netz” grant from the Investitionsbank Sachsen-Anhalt.