Posts Tagged ‘monoprint’

ink blot shirts

In college I had a brief fascination with Rorschach and fell in love with his earnestly scientific, but mostly artistic ink blots.  After I graduated, I took them down from my wall and promptly forgot about them.  Until I saw Martha’s gorgeous take on them in her beautiful line of homewares. I would have liked to pull out my prints and put them back on the wall but I seemed to have randomly dispersed my possessions all over the country after college, so instead I just made some shirts with my kids.

I used this tutorial on instructables for guidance, but did a few things differently:  I taped my shirt around the cardboard instead of tacking it on; he says to not press hard when you fold the shirt over, but I found I had to; and you can see that I fiddled with the image–adding more paint after I already printed it and then folding it again, which will make the image shift a bit, but I sort of like how that looks.  The ones the kids did are more crisp and clear because they just did it once and they were done.

This would be a great project just on paper and it’s  a fun what shapes do you see game–without all the psychological baggage of course.