Gelli Print of the day

I'm taking Julie Balzer's Junque Journal on-line class, and in it I'm taking much of my artwork that's been lying around the house and binding it into a book. The book will have lots of room to add more art, and be my working art journal for some time.  I have assembled 10 out of the 20 pages that I need so far.  Going through all my prints and papers made me really want to get on that Gelli Plate, so yesterday, I took a break from page making and did some printing.

I cut three new stencils for this session. I drew the cat above in marker and then scanned him into Illustrator to make the stencil. I made a small one to use on ATC's, and a large one, because I wanted room to doodle on him. Both the stencil and the mask came out well. In the image with the small cats above, I used both.  My other new stencil was a real pain to get off the cut matt, when it came out of the cuter. The spirals uncurled like little snakes and kept getting tangled and stuck to the matt.  The prints were fun though.

I've bene enjoying seeing the prints other people are making in a Facebook group, and have gotten a lot out of the discussions that follow about techniques and materials. So, I thought I'd one process that was really successful for me yesterday.

This technique makes multicolored prints in one pull.  A thin stencil, like a paper stencil or an acetate stencil like the one I used here, works best for this technique.

Step 1: Roll paint onto your Gelli plate

Step 1

Step 2: Place a stencil and pull a print. Do not remove the stencil. You'll get a sharper two-color effect if you pull a ghost print, or use a baby wipe to dab out paint from the gaps in the stencil. 

Step 2 

Step 3: Brayer a second color right over the stencil.

Step 3

Step 4: Peel off the stencil. Be careful when you put it down; that stencil now has paint on both sides. Pull the print!

Step 4

Here's the print I pulled. I spent some time messing with my phone to take the pictures, so the first layer of paint under the stencil dried out a bit more than in my other prints. I still like the effect though.

The two-color print.

This technique leaves a tidy white edge between colors that I like very much.  You can see this in comparing the two images below.

I made the first image using the technique above.

I made the image below in two layers, first the green, stenciled layer, and then a transparent yellow over the top. There are no white outlines in this one.

Here's one last print I made last night with my tulip stencil. I really like how it came out, but I didn't experiment with it much because it was well past time to go to bed.

Thanks for looking!