With the monoprint, you take a computer printout of a mirror image of your intended drawing, you scribble all over it with pastels, or Conté crayons, or CarbOthello pencils, and then you wet your (smooth) watercolor paper and put your monoprint face down on that to transfer the smudgy vague outline and shadows of your image onto the page. The teacher did this three times in a row, just to get sufficient background.
Then, you look at your opposite image, and draw in details loosely over the top of your more vague background, and you get a lovely squiggly loose shaded portrait.
What I ended up doing was drawing the mirror image in pencil, then acting as if that were the print-out and putting on the transfer media. But...my transfer image ripped when it got wet (too much water? Conté pencils too hard?) so I could only get two layers, and they weren't dark enough. (I think pastels would have made this a whole different exercise...)
Also, the teacher used a profile of a guy with a big cloud of curly hair and a beard and mustache, which provided lots of room for "squiggles" in the final drawing, while I short-sightedly chose this girl with a crown of braids, which are quite defined.
After the transfer, I went back and put a drawing over the top. It's too tight and precise for it to satisfy the objective of this lesson, and doesn't have the beautiful graduated shadows and light that the monoprint should have given. It basically looks like a smudgy, not-very-good portrait drawn in Conté pencil and finger-smudged. (And the only smooth watercolor paper I had was toned tan.)
Oh, well. I will try this again at the end of the month when my printer is up and running. But thanks, Juna, for the lesson!
Pencil, Conté pencil, CarbOthello pencil, and Stabilo All on 184-lb. toned tan mixed media paper, 7.5x10.5 inches.
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