I pretended to be an artist today

The Art Institute of Chicago had a workshop on monotype prints and feeling adventurous, I decided I would go to it since I had the afternoon free. The workshop began by a visit to a monotype by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione from somewhere in the neighborhood of 1640. Castiglione created the print by filling his copper plate with ink and then removing ink to get the white parts of his image. Then we returned to the studio to do our own images. Rather than copperplate, we used plexiglass to ink up and then did our work. 

I had time to do two prints, the first, more successful as a print was a surrealist image of a bouquet of flowers with eyes where the stigma and anthers would be, nestled in a vase which coils and turns into a snake. The second was a straightforward portrait of Saint Rita of Cascia (it being her feast today) which I copied from an image off the internet although I ended up mirroring the image because I was too lazy and untalented to draw it mirrored in the ink.

As a print, the flowers was more succesful, although I think my drawing was better on the St Rita image, but the print failed because, as I discovered on my way home, I had accidentally put a second piece of paper on top of the paper I was printing and this was sufficient to keep the ink from fully impressing itself on the page.