I’m using a little 9x14cm Art Creation sketchbook with my 2×3″ gel plate. (yes, I’m bilingual as far as measurements go, never going to change).
It started out as a project in the Things To Do When Creativity Seems Blocked – one of several tricks that I try to remember as good ways to get started. It’s evolving nicely into a wee source book of ideas for colour, texture, monoprinting, pattern etc, and currently in my Favourite Sketchbooks Pile.
The one on the left is playing with a colour combination I am enjoying just now, and the one on the right is a follow-on from that where I used my tracing of one of my wee faces and transferred it onto the gel plate with charcoal. The next layer is unbleached titanium and a stencil, and the third layer is caput mortuum.
When I lifted the unbleached titanium through the stencil, I also lifted most of the charcoal, so for future reference I would add a layer of clear gesso over the charcoal and let it dry before doing the stencil layer.
That’s the fun of trying and failing, and what, in my opinion, sketchbooks are good for. The fun of gel plate monoprinting is that almost all failures are still pretty.
Til the morn,
Suzanne
243/300
Thrummie Bizzum 
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