Texture Plate Printing

 

Texture plates are great when it comes to monoprinting! And I love the way this one worked! I can imagine it filled with beautiful tangled art, but that is not how I used this print. Let me show you as we continue to talk about gelli plates and prints. 

You know how much I love Art by Marlene. Much of my Zetti art is done with products of Marlene's. Joggles carries her whole line and when I was daydreaming through the list recently I came across this texture plate. It is part of Marlene's Artsy Arabia series and the whole idea of a texture plate intrigued me - that and Barb had it on a really good sell - so I ordered this one. Let me show the back side and you will get a better idea.

This is the back after I used it the first time. It looks like a huge stamp - 6" x 7" - and I guess it really is. You could totally put this on an acrylic block and stamp with it, or add watercolor to it, or Ecoline brush pens and spritz it with water. But that isn't what I was about this particular day. I had my ZigZag Book from Hahnemühle on my desk top and I was printing pages using a gel printing plate given to me by Gelli Arts. Working on my Zetti pages and I thought this was right up my ally with some of the images I wanted to make. 

First I rolled out my acrylic paint with a brayer. The color is calypso teal in the Dylusions Paint bottles.  Seemed a bit watery to me which is why I didn't get great coverage when I brayered out my color. I realized later that these bottles of the Dylusions paint have a shaker ball in them to mix the paint up and that I should have shaken the bottle before I used it. Oh well. Live and learn. I still loved the color and just went for it. And look at my acrylic block. I really like using this 5" x 7" printing plate like a stamp. 

With my printing plate still on my desktop, I took the texture plate and stamped it into the paint. Got a good impression, then lifted it away. I stamped off the residual ink on my trash sheet of paper that will show up somewhere down the road in another project.

With the pages in my ZigZag book protected with bits of craft mat, I turned the whole block with the gel printing plate attached over and stamped it on a page in my book. I knew the whole textured area would not fit because it was larger than my page, so I chose the part I liked best and stamped that. Because the gelli plate is clear - you can see straight through to the book page. How cool is that!

Here is my page with the craft mat protectors still in place. By stamping the page this way I was able to get right up to the edge of the page filled with color and design. And those places where the paint separated on the plate because I didn't shake the bottle first - they made those white lines which is just more texture and I like it!

And I got a decent amount of grunge in the print because of the color left on my gelli plate from previous projects. I think it ages the piece and gives it character! Yep, I do! Hahahaha!

And this is what I did with my print. Hahaha! I put a crazy lady with a bird on her head and two Mickey Mouse toys on it. So I mostly covered the whole thing up but that's ok because I still have the texture plate and can make more. Actually I have 2 or 3 other texture plates. Do you think I know where they are? Not a chance. I need to look for them.

Remember we are looking at gel printing projects all week. I think tomorrow I will talk about marbling and that means I need to go play and make some fun pages to go in that post! Thank you to Gelli Arts for the printing tools and thank you to Hahnemühle for the ZigZag Book. You can find them for purchase just by clicking on those pink letters. Because on all my posts - pink = link.