This past Sunday we spent the day with Regula Russelle as part of our MCBA/Jerome programme. While the others worked with pressure prints, I experimented with monoprints on the Vandercook.

I wanted a cosmos-like, Milky Way-style effect, so using four inks I initially tried to apply all inks to the Plexiglass and print with just one pass of the press. This only resulted in a heavily-inked dark square, too dark even for me. So I tried building it up in successive layers which worked much better. A light layer of black was applied first, followed by white, brown and red. This method gave me more control over where the inks were placed and the ability to build it up gradually.

The images are only 3″ square, so very small, and were finally bound using drum leaf binding. As well as producing this small book, we also learnt 4-needle Japanese binding, which could be another possibility for my book, because this particular style lays perfectly flat.