It's a Gelli Kind of Week

 

All week long we will be looking at gelli printing and talking about different ways to go about making mono prints. I mentioned a couple days ago that I had been blessed by Gelli Arts and Hahnemühle with some mono printing supplies and materials. Let's start with a basic, easy to do printing process. 

I began with my gelli printing plate sitting on an acrylic stamp block. Now, don't let the grungy look of this plate fool you. They don't look like this straight from the package. When you purchase a plate from Gelli Arts it will be clean and pristine, but I have been using this plate for awhile now. AND I never clean them. I know, I know. Gross, right? No, not really. See all that residual color here and there? Some of that will show up in the most unexpected places. And a lot of that is on the back and won't show up anywhere except in my photos. I began with two small squeezes of a yellow Amsterdam acrylic paint. Any acrylic or craft paint will work. Actually a whole lot of things work, but let's start with acrylic. 

Next, I took a brayer and began rolling the color back and forth. You will get a look like this to begin with and you will wonder if that is enough color. It is. Just keep rolling back and forth and side to side. It doesn't take long to completely cover your plate.

Gelli Arts also gave me some stencils. Isn't this a cool one? I kept thinking about my tangle called Skarab. It would work great in these petal sections! I just placed the stencil right on top of all that pretty color. I know it looks green but the color really is yellow. I promise. 

I used a 4" x 6" Nostalgie Sketch Postcard from Hahnemühle and just placed it on top of my gelli plate. Using my hand I smoothed around all over the top, making sure to press down to pick up the color from inside those petals. Sometimes I do this with a brayer. 

Then lifted the paper away. Do you see why it's important to have good pressure as you smooth the paper down onto your gelli plate? I could use this paper as is or I could continue making lifts with it, adding more color until I was satisfied that it was 'done.'

But what about my stencil? It was still 'attached' to my gelli plate. And yes, there was still yellow acrylic color underneath all that white and I didn't want to waste it. 

I took a bright pink in that same Amsterdam line of colors and squeezed out two small globs of color. 

Then used my brayer to roll the color out. All over the stencil and the plate. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I did try to get smooth color down into all the petal areas. 

I had another Nostalgie postcard next to me, so I lifted the stencil and turned it over. Remember that side would have pink color on it from the brayer rolling - and placed it down on the extra postcard. Then I used the brayer to roll back and forth, applying pressure to the stencil. 

When I lifted the stencil away from the postcard, this is what I had. And I could still add more color as I worked. 

This is the plate after I removed the stencil. See those crisp edges on the petals? Nice!

And here is my lift. That yellow is really light in this photo but it is there! This is going to make a really nice postcard to add tangles to. Yes, I could add more mono printing but I like it this way. 

And this is what I had left on my gelli plate. A lot of petal shapes remain. Many people would clean their plate at this point, but not me. I like all that leftover mess. Hahahaha! 

I will apologize for the crookedness of this photo. I could crop it and make it look straight but I want you to see something. See that piece of white gridded stuff to the right? That is a piece of - I don't know the name - liner one puts under rugs and carpets to keep them from sliding on the floor. We got rid of a large piece and I cut this section off to use with mono printing. I began by rolling more of that lovely pink all over my plate, then placed the white gridded thing down and pushed it into the color. Then removed it. 

I flipped that non-slip grid thing-y over and printed the pink side right onto the second postcard I showed you in this post. I didn't know if it would work or not since the grid was waxy-feeling. I really like the dotted framework it gave me. 

But, remember my gelli plate still had the pink color on it. I used a clean postcard to make this pull. Just look at all the wonderful texture! The grid piece left nice blocks of pink color as the main focus. But the real star is all those bits of residual color left behind on my plate from two different stencils I used making projects. One is the petals you saw and the other is a flower stencil I will show you probably tomorrow. 

The Nostalgie postcards from Hahnemühle are the best for mono printing! Smooth, light weight, perfect size for working with. And hopefully you can tell without me saying it how much I love the whole printing process and the gelli printing tools from Gelli Arts! Come back tomorrow to see more!

You can purchase Gelli Arts gel printing plates here. 

You can purchase Nostalgie postcards from Hahnemühle here.