The Farm Girls learn Monoprinting

So, we Farm Girls aren't just learning how to plant and harvest. Tonight we learned monoprinting. One of the new ladies to our group is an artist and she taught us this style of painting/printing. I looked up some links so you could get a idea what it is...unless you already know in which case the rest of this entry may be of no use to you.

This article is cleverly called "How to Make Monoprints".
Kinderart offers this lesson activity with step by step instructions for monoprinting.

The internet, of course, offers more information that I could ever need or digest about this subject, so let's move on to a short explanation of how we did ours.

We used acrylic paints and the friend who taught us brought the rollers. (They probably have a far more technical name, but the word "rollers" gives us visual learners a good mental picture.) She also gave each of us a piece of cardboard with a gallon sized ziploc bag around it. This is what we used to squirt our paint on and roll it around. Very easy. After the paint was rolled around, we made some sort of drawing. We used the eraser end of a pencil, q-tips and cotton balls to make my pictures. Now the picture is drawn (etched) in the paint, we placed a piece of paper over the drawing and pressed it down (without sliding it around). Then we lifted it up and presto--a picture! Here is one of my monoprints.


It was fun and easy (although somewhat messy). I'm going to make cards out of some of the prints.