I mentioned in {Part 1} about not rolling the paint too thick on your gelli plate but I did not show you why. Today you will see. I put some large blobs of purple and green paint onto the gelli plate and rolled them out. Because there was so much paint it turned into a mud color on the plate. I was tempted to wash it off and start over but decided to pull a print anyway to see what would happen.

In the top left corner (below) is the first print I pulled- not at all pretty and it took forever to dry. In the paint that was left on the gelli plate (and there was still a lot), I used the comb to make some lines and tried making some squares with a foam block. In the second print pulled below (shown on the top right), you can see more distinct purple and green colors as well as some of the lines and one square. The third print (lower left) is starting to look much better. You can tell I still had some dark blue paint and yellow paint on the plate from a previous print and it pulled off the gelli plate in this print. The last print was the final ghost print pulled.

I had seen some videos of gelli printing done using some stencils that covered the whole plate. I don’t have stencils like that, so I cut some circles from paper and laid them out on the gelli plate. I rolled blue paint over the paper circles covering the exposed areas of the gelli plate. After I pulled the circles off the plate, I added a little texture with the small dotted craft foam piece, letting some of the blue dots attach onto the circles on the plate. I printed this onto a previously layered print of dark pink, light pink, and green colored paint. I really like how this turned out.

You may remember the print I showed you in {Part 2} using the torn paper strips and bubble wrap (on the left below). I reused my paper circles one more time on the gelli plate, painted around them with green paint and textured the paint with my wavy craft foam. Printing the green circles over that print gave it a whole new look.

Cutting paper shapes works for one or two prints before getting too soggy. I may need to try cutting some basic shapes from thin plastic or acetate so I can reuse them. Stencils are great if you have them, but the advantage of separate pieces over a stencil is the ability to configure them in various creative ways.

In my next post, I’ll show you some nature prints I made with the gelli plate…

…to be continued in {Part 4}