Gelli plate as …. stamp?

09/02/2014 by UKMA 2 Comments

This is another one of those odd things where initially I think Genius idea! but then start to question myself – is this really the easiest way to do things?  What makes it different to how you would normally do it and does it bring something new or not?

Not sure I have an answer, but I had to have a go.  And since I still have a foot tall pile o’ papers to sort thru and organize (from yesterday – no, I didn’t finish. Double Poo) it’s unlikely I’ll get more than the quick try I did earlier to illustrate.

Right.  So I did a background – that was simple enough, using the Cosmic Shimmer (but not shimmery) acrylic ink sprays.  I had a go mixing them on the palette with a bit of glazing medium and rolling that on to the Gelli to pull, and liked it, as it has a nice sheer quality to it.  So then I was thinking I wanted to add some stencil text, but I wanted it to be perfectly placed.  I thought I could just stencil onto the piece, but what I wanted to try was adding other text INSIDE the stencil areas, and that seemed easiest by using the plate.  I did make a placement tool, and it works, but sometimes I get the whole need to reverse things muddled up and when I think something will appear say top right, it ends up top left cause I have not  focused.

So I thought to myself The Gelli Plate is clear – you can see thru it. Hum. Now SOMEWHERE in my office I have a large piece of acrylic a mate cut for me for a totally unrelated purpose.  THAT was what I wanted to find – I will find it, but not today.  What I did find was my old CM circle cutter glass mat.  While the acrylic blocks are 9 x 11 (so totally usable with the larger plate, then glass mat is about 8 x 8 so only useful for the 6 x 6 plate.

I simply stuck the Gelli plate to the glass mat. I laid on the stencil and rolled over the paint, then stamped into it to take some away, giving me the text within text look I was after.

I already know a better stamp for this, but that’ll have to wait for the next playtime.  But you can sort of see the effect.

So that is what is on my plate.  A little glaze medium added to the heavy-bodied paint to let it stay open a bit longer, and this is important.  Why? When I started, my only goal was perfect placement of the text.  But when I was holding the Gelli plate upside down over the background, and getting ready to stamp it down onto where I thought I wanted it to go, I realized I could move the plate over the pice, looking down thru it, and make some more conscious decisions about exactly where I wanted it to be.  The paint needs to stay open long enough for you to dither….

As you can see the old glass mat has a lot of cuts in it, so I didn’t let the Gelli plate hang about on top of it.  But so long as you don’t leave the Gelli on  a scarred glass mat it should be fine for a session – a day and you will find the marks in the glass have transferred to your plate.

Where I think this way of using the plate is helpful is if you don’t want the SURPRISE! element with your printing.  I agree that pulling a print when you have an idea of how it might look, but no certainty, is fun but the flip side of that is sometimes I pull off the print and go OH NO! cause I messed it up.  And some techniques on the plate are not as easy to do another way.  Sure, like I said, you can always lay on the stencil and ink or paint thru it, but the taking AWAY paint is harder.  So if you wanted to say mask off a big circle, then add a stencil and brayer over the stencil to remove the paint, than add some marks THEN print all that onto the background maybe inside a circle you had already pulled on the background, I don’t know how I would do that without using the Gelli plate!

I like the idea of creating my little composition on the plate then turning it over, looking THRU the plate to the background and knowing when I stamp it down I will get exactly what I want where I .

Sorry the photos aren’t more informative, and I am wordy, as ever, but I hope it gives you some ideas for play.  SOMEONE should be having fun today cause it sure isn’t me.  I should have taken another photo of the appropriate mug to sum up two days of boring paperwork, but I’ll settle for adding it a different way