Patiently waiting for the weather to warm up, I was looking back at photos I had taken of Florida over Christmas break. I had some really good ones of palm trees in Orlando so I decided to make a monoprint of one of the pictures.

I started by painting the sky while using a process that involves taping off the areas I was going to have the tree trunks. This works great because I could freely paint the background area and then pull off the tape and paint in the palm trees. This was very tedious work but well worth it. It was interesting creating the shadows on the palm trees because the dark areas didn’t feel like shadows until the end. The hardest part was painting in the palm leaves. I didn’t want to add a lot but I wanted enough to be recognizable.

Painted plate. Oil-based.

This may have been the most time consuming print I have done but it is also one of the most successful ones. I really liked the first image I printed but the ghost image was just as successful. The ghost image is just a print of what was left over on the plate. I might have been able to get one more print but I didn’t end up having enough time to try it out.

First image.

Ghost image.