Try It Out Tuesday : Fussy Printing.

I really enjoy making monoprints with transfer paints, or thickened dyes.  The image above is an example of a monoprint, random black shapes on a yellow background.  The colours are muted because this is the paper version; transfer paints look very nondescript on paper, but brighten up considerably when ironed onto cloth.  I've taken off a couple of prints from this image already, at full size (A4).  But that's not the only way of using a monoprint, or any other transfer dyed paper.  You can 'fussy print' at a smaller scale, by finding an area of the print that you think is interesting, and transferring only that section to a piece of cloth.  In this case, I'm printing on small pieces of Evolon that were kicking about in the studio, offcuts from a larger project.

This time, I liked the upper part of the print, so I took a postcard sized scrap, and looked to see how much of it I could fit onto the paper.  I worked straight from the paper to the fabric, but if you find it hard to imagine what something might look like transferred, try making yourself a paper or card 'frame', or use a mount cut to the size of your cloth.  That way, you can move the mount around the cloth until you find the configuration you like best.  If you don't want to use the paper complete again, then cut or tear the selected area, so that it's easy to transfer to the cloth.  I ended up with this selection; see if you can work out where it came from!

It's interesting...but it doesn't feel quite complete.  There's a big gap roughly centre right, and it doesn't feel completed, somehow.  So I repeated the process, choosing another area of the paper, and produced this result;

To me, this feels a lot more balanced.  I'll now add some stitch.  Why don't you give this a try?  Paint a pattern of some sort, print one off at full size, and then, working at a smaller scale, build up a smaller piece using selected parts of the original print.  It's fun!