Hello! My name is Aindri and this is a post about cruising through mono print- a medium I’ve been using a lot in my illustration and animation journey

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2017 -2020

This was the first project where I used basic food printing technique which I felt went with the story about food shapes. It took me back to school doing dharosh-aaloo prints for fun.

I made work on two other projects with the same technique:

All the things -biodegradable and non biodegradable -that I was growing and throwing away ended up in a library of

Then one day I came across the work of Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón at an exhibition. Her technique, collagraphy not only blew my mind but her entire body of work has had a huge influence on me since.

2017-

Outside of my commissions I started playing with printmaking while listening to the audiobook of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. I am not into fantasy art and this was a whole new territory. Also since migrating to an archipelago I began to relate to the story a lot.

I also kept a sketchbook of things I was growing that summer. This was my kit that I took to the fields, it fit in a makeup purse easily:

2020

Then I had a chance to explore animation. This was for an film commissioned by Poetry Society and Poetry Cinema. Helmie the producer really encouraged me to try out this technique after seeing a few of my sketchbook drawings. So far I can work with loops of two frames but want to explore how this plays out with more frames in sequence

2021

This year I had a chance to go on a retreat with Kinsi and the Numbi family where I tried out a different plate (Styrofoam instead of gelli) and I liked the line work and texture- I was also able to somewhat control the positions – it’s quite hard trying to do all this in a single layer animation-

2020-

Then I discovered tiktok during the pandemic. I will write more about how I’ve basically ghosted instagram for a while because I feel the app heavily influenced how I was presenting my work, which got prioritized over the process behind the work. I also didn’t enjoy sharing photos of the wips. On tiktok I found a way to use the process with my illustration and it almost became performance like. Also I love music! So this phase has taken me to the time I used to be a promo designer for a music channel

I have been making gelli animations with Numbi and they have encouraged me with my experiments. I recently made an animation on Deghdeer produced by them. The film is based on a legendary mythical figure from Somali folklore

I want to develop a visual language combining digital drawings with printmaking through a short project-which I am currently working on whenever I get time.

At the moment, a big part of the pandemic has been about shifting away from Adobe suite subscription and finding more ethical, proprietary and free apps to develop this. So a lot of unlearning and learning is happening in the process.

I am really enjoying Clip Studio at the moment and learning to use Affinity Photo. Here’s a sneak peak of my OC:

You can follow my journey on youtube and tiktok. Any tips or advice is most welcome!