Watercolour monotypes - 2026

Publication date: 19 February 2026

A 'monotype' is a one-off print. Scroll down to see some examples!

On first view, these look a little like traditional watercolours, but they are, in fact, created by printing separate watercolour paintings that have been made on individual pieces of acetate (plastic) sheet.

The key 'trick' with this technique is to allow the paint on each acetate layer to dry prior to printing onto dampened paper. The damp paper reactivates the watercolour paint when printed using an etching press.

There are some advantages to producing images in this way, rather than by painting them in the traditional way:

- because each layer is painted separately it can be discarded if it goes wrong, without having to abandon the whole painting

- because the acetate is clear it can be laid on top of the previously painted layer to ensure alignment etc

- there is less blending of the paint than would likely occur using the traditional watercolour method - this can result in greater visibility of some of the edge effects

There are also some disadvantages with this technique:

- if anything goes wrong at the printing stage (such as paper slippage etc) there's not much you can do to save the print

- getting the acetate plates to align perfectly is a bit of a challenge, which can lead to slightly messy edges (as can be seen with most of these examples) - but some people might like this effect - but I'm planning to minimise it!

- the traditional relationship between the brush, the paint and the paper is replaced with a different 'feel' as the paint is applied to the acetate. What happens after that is down to the relationship between the acetate and the paper!

- painting onto acetate brings its own challenges - the surface texture of the water which causes it to pull away from the non-porous acetate surface being one such. But there are agents you can add to the water that will help with this

- the density of the colour can be difficult to judge - especially if you are looking for large areas of opacity

- and speaking of large areas... scaling up to large acetate sheets is proving to be quite difficult, at least at the time of writing (mid-February, 2026)

Please contact me if you would like to buy any of these (they are available at £75 - UK postage free)