Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Using the 4-Inch Round Gelli Plate with "Stencil Guts"


For an earlier post, I used my 8-inch round Gelli Arts Plate with "Stencil Guts," the currently sold-out masks from StencilGirlProducts.com. 

For today's post I switched to my 4-inch round Gelli Plate, which can be used in much the same way as a rubber stamp. 

The round plate is placed on an acrylic base and brayered with a layer of open acrylic paint; next, one or more masks are pressed into this wet paint.  Then the plate is turned over and firmly pressed -- wet side down -- to the substrate.  This easy process is shown here: 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iK5GeXMMFI

It's important to note here that, for me, masks don't work exactly the same way as the stencils used in the above video.  Rather than remove the mask before making the print, I had more success when I kept the mask, or masks, on the Gelli Plate while inverting it and pressing it firmly to the substrate.

Because these masks stay securely in place on the plate, held there by the wet paint, this stamping-type technique can easily be used on any smooth surface -- clayboard, journal pages, etc. 

The surface doesn't even need to be horizontal.  These masks stay in place so well, in the wet paint on the plate, that they can be used vertically too.  Think walls, furniture, etc. 

Here are some of my prints:




In the above print, you can see that I removed some masks from still-wet paint and pressed them onto a paper that had been previously printed with the 4-inch round plate.  I did likewise in the print shown below.


For the prints shown here, my substrates were pages from old encyclopedias.  I chose pages that originally had drawings of birds of various kinds.  Many of those original birds got covered during the printing process ... but a few of them managed to stay visible even after multiple prints.