I've been taking the time to sort through gelli prints today, and oh boy... I have an intimidating pile of "needs more work" and "cut me up" papers.

I may need to lie down from overwhelm.

I don't play around much with laser and magazine transfers in my gelli prints, but I did get an interesting one when I was making masks with magazines...

Experimenting: water-soluble oil pastel and dilute gouache on the gelli plate.

Start by rolling out a good layer of clear acrylic gesso, to create a workable surface, but work with a light touch, as it's fragile.

Next time I'd dip the pastels in water so they slide better.

Playing with spraying alcohol or water (fine spray or bigger droplets) onto acrylic paint, on the gelli plate. #fun

Tips:
I used heavy body, and first thinned the paint a lot with retarder. Thinning with water wasn't as good.
pickup sheet was raw Xuan rice paper (very absorbent)
remove the pickup sheet after a few seconds, to get all the details. Else it spreads and blurs.

/cc @nikkiana :-)
#gelliprint #gelliprinting #printmaking #monoprint #monoprinting #printmaking

There was something so yummy about this brown and bronze print over sheet music... Using thrifted books for paper is one of my favorite things.

My first two pulls this morning were absolute disasters! Paint dried unevenly, paper split when I went to pull, and I was left pulling little papery bits off the plate.

This used to make me so mad when it would happen, and still can if I was too attached to the idea of the print I was about to pull. But more and more these days, a failed print is more like a happy accident.

The prints that rip straight off the plate are very often the first pieces to be pasted into collage pieces, and since they're from printer paper that split, they're so thin. It's perfect!

A little abstract collage today to distract me from my injured finger.

I picked up these gesso board substrates at Goodwill today and I'm honestly not sure why I hadn't thought to try them before.

Gel printing directly onto a hard surface definitely acted different than paper, but I think I like it!

Today, I ended up picking up an empty box of seltzer and starting a work of art on the back of it.

I wonder where this one is going to go...

Sometimes a ghost print comes out so good that I'm like "Ugh! Why did I print that on copy paper!"

One of my tricks to keeping momentum after time away from the studio corner is not pulling my final gel print of the day until the next time I'm working on prints. I had this lovely iridescent purple grid waiting for me when I got back!

I've been doing these splotchy colorful prints lately where I use a little too much paint so there's a fun ghost print to pull.

I never know how they're going to turn out, but so often they just turn out to be an absolute delight!

One of the things I love about the gel plate is how little time and effort it demands of me to make a single piece of interesting paper.

I'm still not entirely sure what to do with all of the paper that you get after doing this all day though.