Tag: Gelli Plate

  • Gelli prints

    What’s the perfect thing to do on Good Friday? Make art of course! I got out my 6×6″ Gelli Plate, Golden Fluid Acrylic paints, a pile of stencils and got to work. I mainly printed on 120gsm white paper but a few telephone pages were harmed in the making of these prints…who needs to look up Stratford numbers anyway? I made dozens of prints, these are just a few favourites.

    image0-012

    Tony came home as I was cleaning up and we had one of those conversations where I was reminded once again how lucky we are to have each other, and how respectful and careful we are of each other’s feelings. We even ended up commenting on that; that we choose to operate on a level of care and respect.

    Look, I say, holding up the two purple ones with red and white patterns underneath. They match. No they don’t, says Tony. Yeah, they do – they’re both purple with red and white underneath. Tony: that doesn’t mean they match! Me: well close enough… he shrugs and laughs.

    Round two. We’ve been talking about repainting the middle room, currently lime green, in a cream shade so I can display more art. He’s watching, amused, as I rifle through my pile of prints, considering my next step with them – a journal maybe? Suddenly he says – you could cut them into proper squares and display them in a grid on the middle room when the walls painted. I’m so excited I flap my hands at him 😉 He just laughs and says he regrets the suggestion already. Then he looks at me and utters his favorite line “So, what are they going to be?”

    And my reply: They’re not going to ‘be’ anything, they just are. Oh, he says, and smiles at me.

    Even the newsprint I cleaned my brayer off on each time has been put aside to do something with. Both pieces have such cool colors and this amazing texture. And for the record, I love my Gelli Plate!

    image0 image0-001

  • Pulling prints

    Reading Martha’s recent posts about her experiments with Gelli Plates did two things; it rekindled my interest in print making, and it encouraged me to buy a Gelli Plate. Tony is working in Wanganui today on the ambulance, and left at 5.45 so I have had all day on my own. My sister Ailsa and nephew Rowan arrived on Friday to visit Mum, but left at 11am this morning. Incidentally, Mum was delighted to see Rowan and knew who he was almost straight away. On the other hand she thought the wool scarf I was carrying was our dog, Faith. Go figure!

    Anyway…I did a bit of work that needed seeing to, did the washing and the dishes and so on, then out with the Gelli Plate and some Golden Fluid Acrylics, plus some stencils I had cut a while back, and some scraps of corrugated cardboard. I do seem to have a thing for hearts, stars and the stripes corrugated cardboard make at the moment.  I love combinations of teal, bright yellow, deep blue and bright green so thought I’d start with those. I got mixed results, partly because initially I didn’t think to mark where the Gelli Plate sat, so my registration was way off. These are not finished – I’ll probably work over the top of these by hand, adding text and more marks, but I think I’m going to love my new way of making prints. Thanks Martha!

  • Experimenting with stencils

    I’ve been experimenting with stencils and spray inks lately. I find the process quite messy, probably because I forget to put gloves on in my excitement to get started, but I love the results. The inks I’ve been using aren’t waterproof so I have to be careful about using water media in the top layers, but other than that, they’re very versatile.  I’ve also starting making my own sprays by using Golden Fluid acrylics and water in a fine Derwent spray bottle. It means I can make my own colours and the result is waterproof so I can use water media in the upper layers.  Incidentally, I got the spray bottle to go with a set of Derwent Inktense Blocks, and I love them.

    I can see all kinds of possibilities with layering images using the stencils. I lent them to some ladies at the library the other day, and they had a great time decorating garden pots using them. We gave the terracotta pots two quick coats of gesso, then a base layer of whatever acrylic colour they fancied and let them loose with the stencils.

    In the meantime my friend Martha Marshall has started experimenting with Gelli Plates. Martha makes fabulous prints anyways; she’s a fearless artist who never hesitates to experiment. I’m fortunate to own a few works by Martha and love them all. Anyway, watching the work she is producing with the Gelli Plates makes me want to try incorporating some print making with using stencils. In the past I have done lino cutting and mono prints, so once I have done the next newspaper and sent it to the printers, it might be time to get out the lino cutting tools…

    This is the lino I cut for printing the Coliseum