Fig. 310.
Fig. 311.
CHAPTER XII
MONOTYPES
They are charming, these monotypes; charming in effect when finished, delightful in their accidental results, and wholly fascinating in the method, or lack of method, used in their production. Painted with a bristle brush, a camel’s-hair brush, a sponge, a rag or your thumb, as the case may require; painted on glass and then printed on paper, with a clothes-wringer for a printing-press; can anything be more enchantingly unconventional? Yet the finished monotypes are truly artistic and beautiful. If you can paint at all, be it ever so little, you can make some kind of a monotype, and you will always have the feeling that you can do better next time. The
Materials
for your work are a piece of glass about six inches square, a tube of lamp-black oil-paint, some sewing-machine oil, and a pad of unruled writing-paper.
See that your glass is perfectly clean and free from dust, squeeze out some of the black paint in a saucer and mix it with a few drops of the machine oil. You will soon learn the consistency required, for if you make the paint too thin it will run and blot, and if there is not enough oil it will go on too thickly and smudge in printing.
The Painting