Alcohol Ink Experiments on the Gelli Plate

 

Alcohol ink and gelli plates. I never thought they would go together. At all. Until I saw a blog post on the Gelli Arts site where they combined the two into a piece of art. Last week I worked with the Brea Reese alcohol inks and though I wasn't totally happy with the results, I was happy enough. For today's post I worked with two other brands and had better success. 

I started with Marabu alcohol inks and shook out some drops of yellow onto my gel printing plate. Don't be concerned about that red along the side. That is actually a stain on my craft mat underneath the gelli plate. If you haven't used Marabu alcohol inks before they don't really work well for squeezing out a drop at a time. I have better success just shaking the bottles at the gelli plate and getting splatter drops. 

I used a brayer to roll the yellow ink out over the plate, completely covering the surface. Then I placed this stencil down over the top of the yellow. Using your brayer to lightly roll over the stencil will help it adhere better to the plate, which makes the next step possible. 

I used a pink, a green, and a teal ink colors and added them a little at a time by dropping color right onto the stencil openings. Then I used my brayer to roll the color out, just like I would if I was working straight onto my gelli plate. And I let this sit to dry. Alcohol inks dry quickly so you have to work with a purpose. 

Once the ink was dry, I removed the stencil and this is what I had. In that whole section where you don't see color - I added yellow there. But I can't really see it. You won't be able to lift a print at this point. The ink is dry on the plate, so I knew I needed to add something 'wet' for it to adhere to and make a print possible. 

White acrylic works well for this. I guess you could use any color you want to, but white will keep your alcohol ink colors true. Just roll out a layer all over the plate and place your paper down and smoosh it down all over. Making sure to get those corners.

And here is my print. Ok, I remembered the corners. Mostly. But I didn't get good coverage across that whole lower right hand section. None of the yellow seemed to work. 

Well, I was ready to try something else. I have at least three more brands of alcohol inks I wanted to try. So I put down another layer of white acrylic and lifted away more color. Pretty cool how you can still see flowers from the previous print. 

I decided to try the Ranger alcohol inks even though the fumes were sure to give me a headache. 

I went with the exact same process. A layer of yellow brayered over the entire plate, place the stencil on the plate and start adding in colors of ink. The trick here is to use a reasonable amount of ink and brayer it before it dries. Once you have on all the color you want, let it dry before removing the stencil. You want to avoid puddles. That means you used too much ink. Go with a lighter hand at first. 

Once you remove the stencil, roll out a thin layer of acrylic. Then make your print. For all these prints I used 5" x 7" pieces of Bristol Illustration paper from Hahnemühle. I use their Bristol for almost everything I do. 

And I got a better print this time. More coverage, better colors, and I really like this one! I will show it to you better in a minute. 

And here is my clean up print. I like it, too! So even though the Ranger brand gives me a really bad headache, they came through for me in these lifts. 

The Marabu print.

The Marabu cleanup print.

The Ranger print (I love it!).

The Ranger clean up print. Why keep the clean up prints? They make great tangling backgrounds, art journal page bases, even collage elements. I could add watercolor in those blank areas or use some spray inks and water. They are not useless prints. So save them all and add them to your stash!

Gelli Arts gel printing plates and supplies can be purchased here. 

Hahnemühle Bristol Illustration paper can be purchased here.