Vision Journal Collective: Class 6 ~ Being playful with paint and Gelli Plates ...

One of the fun things we did in class this week was play with paint and gelli plates. I remember in the 70's we played with gelatin plate monoprinting in high school art class. Although it was fun, I really didn't see the point.

These days, however, always on the search for unique papers to use in my journals (or for journal covers), I now get it. So I thought I'd share the fun with all of you.

One of the primary advantages of using a Gelli Plate to create monoprints is that unlike old-fashioned gelatin, the plate is permanently ready and needs very little maintenance. If you haven't seen one before, imagine if you made clear jello about twice as thick as normal ~ it's jiggly, but stable. Cool and squishy under your touch, but not slimy. This makes it an excellent surface to layer on acrylic paint, make your mark in the paint using stencils, q-tips or blunt marking tools and then pull off a print onto paper.

Here's a video to give you an idea of what that process looks like.

For those of you who were asking about paint colours we used ... here's a page from my journal

At the start of class, I pulled a few simple prints using cool colours and a circle stencil, a compass stencil and very cheap texture stamps I've cut from 1" rigid pink insulating foam sheet (which comes in 4'x8' sheets from the hardware store ~ enough to last a life time!).

Then I switched over to warm colours, as well as using the circular gelli plate:

So ... what do you use them for? I gelli print onto cardstock to make my own unique journal covers, I print onto slightly heavy text weight paper to make journals out of, and I print onto cheaper 20 lb, photocopy paper to make my own "scrapbooking" paper as well. The lighter papers can be cut up and collaged into your jounal, or to make backgrounds for thank you cards.

With the addition of GAC 900, you can turn your plain acrylics into paints that can print onto fabrics for gifts bags, pencil cases, too. Most fabric paints work on the gelli plate as well, but depending on their brand, they may stain the plate, so I'd recommend adding GAC to ordinary acrylics to be safe.

Below I've added some scans of gelli prints from my collection so you can see more of the possible range of this fun paint art toy. For these prints, I used strips of sticker paper to pull the prints and then arranged them on cardstock so I could scan and print them out as my own scrapbooking paper. I used a variety of stencils, bubble wrap, mark making (by scraping tools through the paint) and mult-layering the prints.