Decalcomania! Decalcomania!

But first…
Dulltown, Europe: Today’s financial forecast is for choppy fat bonds on shiny steel meat hooks, with triple witching going on in the murky cloisters.
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Here, my dear reader, is a piece of my decalcomania for you to look at.
Lost you already? Perhaps a little explanation might be in order…
Decalcomania is a form of monoprinting done with ink or paint on paper. Usually a fine art print comes as one item from a set of identical images, each one having been numbered and signed by the artist as a ‘limited edition’, but the monoprint, sometimes called a monotype, is a one-off unique piece of work, which means of course that you can charge a little bit more for it!
If you’d like to know more about decalcomania, and perhaps give the technique a try yourself, (Yes, do! It is really quite easy!) you could have a look at my popular ‘how to do it’ blog post on the subject, you must bear in mind though that this shows you my way of doing decalcomania, which may differ from the way other people do it:
Decalcomania for all… | Dave Whatt

This one is on 16″ x 12″ white drawing paper and is untitled. I can’t be bothered giving them titles; I have so many of the bloody things it would be a very tedious task. They are so quick and easy to do, even after you have thrown out the boring ones, you still end up with lots of them piled up. I suppose that I could number them if I was a bit more organised. I’ll tell you what, let’s call this one ‘Decalcomania No. 78’ – there, that sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Makes it look a little better too, don’t you think? There’s nothing like a nice title to perk up an art work!
If you look carefully at our ‘Decalcomania No. 78’  you may notice that I have added some pencil to the print after it had dried. Although the process of printing is very unpredictable, and automatically produces random and surprisingly beautiful effects, I do feel the need to tweak the image a little, using ‘shading’ with a pencil to enhance the three-dimensional appearance of some of the marks.
So there it is! What do you think? Intriguing isn’t it?
I spent part of yesterday afternoon photographing a few of these, so you can look forward to seeing more of them in future posts…