Painting Gel Prints With ZenART Brushes

 

There is a whole lot of great going on in this post today! And there are a load of photos! The paper you see is The Collection from Hahnemühle. It is their new game in town paper and I love it! The background was made with a 4" round gel printing plate from Gelli Arts! All painting was completed using a couple different brushes from ZenART. Let's just jump right in and get started.

The Collection comes in hot, cold and rough. I chose the cold pressed watercolor paper for this piece. It comes ten sheets to the block and they are 9.4" x 12.6" in size. Using a 1" painters tape I roughly divided my page into two equal painting areas. Hahaha! Look at that center line! Not in the middle at all. Hahahahaha! 

Gelli Arts was so kind to send me a few of these 4" round gel printing plates to use for giveaways in Tangle All Around. I thought the plate would make an interesting background to paint on so I brought mine out of the drawer along with my 2" brayer. It is my favorite!

For this project I brought out my Dina Wakley Acrylic Paints and just squeezed out a drop of three colors. This plate is small and doesn't need a lot of paint. 

Nothing fancy in this print. I just brayered out the color and stamped it right down onto my paper. Stamped? Yes. I have a 6" x 8" thin acrylic block that I placed the gel plate onto. That way I can just stamp the print and put it exactly where I want it on my paper. 

You can see how it turned out here. I used a stencil to make the print in the upper corner. The gel plate here shows the color remaining after I lifted away the stencil. 

After stamping that print in the upper left corner - I did not clean the plate. You can still see the faint pink spots. I added a drop of yellow and rolled it out in a light layer across the plate. Right on top of that pink. 

And I stamped it right there in the bottom. 

Again - don't clean off the plate. I placed a cute stencil on the plate, then rolled a layer of bright pink over the whole thing. 

I lifted the stencil away. You can see that there would still be paint on the stencil. I don't like wasting product, so I turned the stencil over and placed it onto my paper. I used a clean brayer to roll over the stencil hoping the color would adhere to my paper. 

And it worked decently. I already knew I was going to paint over this whole page and I knew from experience that this section of flowers was going to look great!

But what about my gelli plate? Remember we had a light layer of yellow already on the plate. To that I added the stencil and a layer of pink. When I removed the stencil this is what I had on my plate. Love it!

I took the plate and stamped it right onto my page. 

But I didn't press hard enough to get the whole print. Booooo! But it happens. Even to me. 

I kept printing until the entire page was covered in pretty. 

Using an ultra fine Sharpie I drew my florals. They include tangles: Lucy, goose and weave. 

And then it was time to paint. In my watercolor tin is a mix of Schmincke and Daniel Smith watercolors. I get them in tubes and try to keep my pans full. For my brushes I turned to ZenART. I have two of their brush sets and have been using them on a regular basis lately. For the larger areas I used their #8 round brush. For the smaller, tighter areas I used their #2 round. Great brushes. You can't go wrong with ZenART. In fact I am an Affiliate for them. You can click any of my ZenART links and they will take you straight to the product I used. 

I wanted to point something out. The large circle on the left - midway up. When I originally stamped that print I realized it was way too dark for what I wanted to do with this page. If you gel print a layer that is too dark - don't despair. Take that plate and roll on a thin layer of white acrylic, then stamp right over the area that was too dark. The white lightens it up and because I used a thin layer you can still see the detail underneath. 

Using my ultra fine and fine Sharpies, I drew the florals in the style I learned from Tracy Weinzapfel. 

For the painting on this page I went with the #8 round brush from ZenART. Even in the background that I painted over - you can still see the gel prints. The petals of the flowers were not painted. I left those alone so the beautiful gel prints would show through. Details were added with a white Sharpie paint pen. 

And here is the other piece completed with white highlights. I left this background unpainted, just the gel prints showing. 

These pages were a lot of fun and I got to use several media and techniques. I was able to combine Hahnemühle's The Collection cold pressed watercolor paper with watercolor, acrylics, paint pen, Sharpies and gel printing. Awesome! And all the products worked so well together! 

Affiliate links:

ZenART 14 Pc Professional Watercolor Brush Set For Artists

ZenART Fine Line Detail Brushes , 12 Pc Thin

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Hahnemühle's The Collection can be purchased by clicking here

Gel printing plates from Gelli Arts can be purchased here