I will say up front starting from day thirty six, and including today’s creation, that all of these current challenges required some minor research and purchasing some materials. With that said, what an awesome challenge this was!

Day Thirty Seven’s challenge asked us to gather some material together to create a mono Zentangle print. Now I will admit, I was put-off from this challenge because of the suggested method and materials required to create a mono print. I knew there were easier methods out there back from my college days, so I took at brief cruise around the internet to find the perfect method for me.

I stumbled across a mono printing demo from Derwent Pencils using their awesome Inktense blocks. After watching the brief demo, I was immediately hooked on the method. The demo they showed was using their Print Making set, but unfortunately all the art stores around me were sold out of the kit. To work around this problem, I took another look at what was in their kit and found that I could replicate most everything in the kit with what I had at home. Here is a list of supplies I gathered:

1. Gray Foam Craft Sheet
2. Set of Inktense Blocks
3. Embossing tool
4. Brayer
5. Water bottle spritzer

Since I knew I would be printing on 3.5″ square tiles, I made sure I cut down my gray foam sheet into a 3″ square. With my embossing tool, I drew a simple tangle patterns using a new tangle called “Warmth” and an old standby “Florz”. Mono printing requires you to use very simple design, so I kept to just two tangles for this creation.

The rest of the process is very similar to the one you see in this Derwent Pencils demo:

This was such a great experience that I am totally in love with process. After creating my first print, I still had so much color still left on the gray foam block that I was able to reprint two more tiles:

As you can see, each tile is different from the next one. I guess that is what I love most about this process. You just don’t know what you will get once you remove paper from your printing block. I had some much fun with this process and this was incredibly easy to do. I may post a video tutorial in the near future on my exact process, but I hope I explained this well enough that you can try this method for yourselves.

Well, it’s time to go for now. I hope you enjoyed this post and mini tutorial.

Until next tomorrow…