Experimenting with Monotype Printing

I've always loved monotype prints. They often present stark objects in a soft, muted way, but with impact.

I decided to start experimenting with this technique on my own because I'd like to incorporate printing in my artwork. I had a small piece of glass laying around so I put a little paint on the glass and pulled two prints. It was surprisingly easy and I like the scratchy effect. These are the first two that I did. Now I'm looking for a larger piece of glass in order to do some larger prints with different types of paint.

Window Farms

Yes- you read that right. Window farm. I ran across this website recently which is all about this movement to create indoor window vegetable farms. They have plans and pictures and it looks amazing.

I think I've mentioned before that I recently went back to school to get my Ecology degree and I'm a plant nerd, so the idea of a window farm is thrilling! And I have almost a month off starting in a few days so this is my winter break project. I love that this is a D-I-Y project and the site has some great How-To manuals which should be really helpful in getting me sorted out on how to build this little farm. I miss gardening in the winter so this is the perfect solution. We live in a really old house with tall narrow windows that will be great for a window farm. Unfortunately none of them are south facing, but they do get lots of direct light in the summer so I may just need to supplement the light a little bit for part of the winter.

Now I just have to do the following:

• Design the farm
• Pick the plants (if only there were a way to grow coffee beans to support my habit...)
• Collect used plastic bottles
• Get seeds
• Get other stuff
• Put it all together

Simple! Maybe. Ok, probably not.

I'll be documenting the farm building progress here on my blog so stay tuned...