Monoprinting Sessions at Trillium Graphics:

Leaving well enough alone is not our strong suit at Trillium. By tinkering, figuring, adjusting and conceptualizing, Master Printer David Salgado invented a new means of working within a traditional medium. With traditional Plexiglas monotyping, one image and an additional "ghost" image can be pulled per image the artist paints. After that, the Plexiglas must be cleaned and the artist begins work anew. With offset "Serial Monoprinting" at Trillium Press we have been able to regularly achieve up to seven images from a single painting.
Instead of painting on Plexiglas, artists at Trillium paint on Mylar affixed to a thin aluminum plate. We print from that plate and by adjusting the pressure on the press, we can generate anywhere from four to seven identical images from one painting. Registration is perfect in this process, and creating prints with multiple drops is executed with great facility. It is also possible to seal the prints in between drops, thus allowing the artist to vary the opacity of ink on subsequent drops creating a delicately layered image. Because we print on an offset press, the image the artist creates is right-reading, a great advantage to those used to monotyping and envisioning their image in reverse. Artists also have the option of monoprinting on top of digitally printed backgrounds, thus generating a set of multi-layered multiples not possible in any other shop.