My first experiments with the CP as a stamp mount, what led me to this post
That last link is full of warnings – press the stamp HARD onto the CP. Don’t use it in this way if you worry about messing up whatever you are stamping on to. Shake the mount. Wash the backs. blah blah blah.
I kept finding that, with every use, the CP surface got less and less sticky and washing it was too much of a bother if I had to do it every time I wanted to stamp an unmounted stamp.
I store most of my unmounted stamps like so:
In binders, and then in baseball card sleeves:
I have not ever wanted to go to the expense of mounting all the stamps, and bulking up the binders. So over the years I have come up with a few different methods that work for me. Generally, a strip of strong double-sided tape on a clear mount will do the trick.
I bought a bottle of Aileens Tack It (over & over) cause lots of people recommended it as a good way to make the red rubber, unmounted stamps into “cling” stamps. It works, sure, but then you have to store all these sticky backed stamps. Ah … No.
Fast forward to the post of CP as mount and….an idea!
Yep.
Why this works – first, the CP is just a bit spongy. Not too spongy, but enough that it acts as both the mount and the cushion and gives a nice image (might have been nice had I actually shown that – sorry, I’m out of practice at blogging) especially when stamping on to my cork-floor-tile-in-a-big-ziplock-bag stamping mat. Second, there is only the couple of CP chunks that are sticky. Easy to store. I keep a lot of plastic packaging. This is from a Spellbinders die. I just flipped the halves so rather than tightly encasing the die, there is a slim open area that fits two of the sticky CP bits.
Perfect fit.
Now, this makes sense for me because I already own a (mostly useless for the kind of monoprinting I like to do) Creative Palette. But the CP is not widely for sale anymore (or not that I could find) and if you don’t already have one, this is not a good enough reason to go buy one.
As a cheap alternative, I had a go at coating a piece of sticky-backed fun foam with the Tack It. It worked just fine.
There is a slight issue with the fun foam being quite thin. When you press to stamp the sticky surface can just grab the paper – I found this to be most problematic with tissue paper, not at all an issue with a paint-coated journal page, for example. I did not find it as much an issue with the CP-as-mount.
In hunting for my CP package, I unearthed a nice gelli-print, so I can add at least one decent looking image for you LOL!:
Now I must decide what to do with it.
If you have a Creative Palette gathering dust, why not turn it into a set of stamp mounts? If you don’t have one, try the sticky-backed fun foam. Let me know if it works for you!
I was super excited when I discovered that it is possible to pull a resist print from the Gelli plate by stamping with pigment ink onto glossy paper from a magazine, then pressing that to a gel plate covered with paint.
From yesterday, this was literally the first one I tried:
I think we can all agree there was, upon seeing that, reason to be excited.
I tried a fair few prints later in the day, using many different ink and paint combos and had nothing like the success of that one. Even the other ones from the same session were good, but not as impressive:
So, I thought I needed to sit down and do a rather orderly series of attempts to see what happened. Try to come up with a set of rules that would, if not guarantee success, would at lease make it more likely.
Not bloody likely, more like it. This is the array of stuff I tried – and it looks like I cut out the Crafter’s ink pad and the Studio G one:
This is what I got:
For the most part, a pretty appalling array. I did discover a few things. First, and most disappointingly, the only pigment ink that works consistently was the one from the Greetings Card kit. None of the ColorBox inks of any kind worked at all – not the pigment (tried a few colours) not the Chalk ink, not the Cats eye ones. The Studio G left a very very faint hint and might be worth trying again with a jucier pad.
In all cases, at least some of the magazine text transferred. So I feel confident the paper is not the problem.
What worked 95% of the time was:
There’s the Crafter’s ink!
The rules, so far as I can determine thus far are:
1. The paint on the plate must be thin – almost thin enough to be called transparent.
2. The pigment ink must be wet. Ink, stamp on the glossy paper, then flip it over on to the plate and burnish the back right away. Don’t dawdle. If the ink is too dry it seems to work less well.
3. Let it dry 100% before adding the next layer of paint and trying to pull the print off.
4. Again, this layer needs to be thin, but don’t overwork it. Load the brayer off the plate, roll on the paint and brayer just enough so you can see the image thru the paint. Pull the print quick – don’t let they paint get too dry!
That process resulted in these:
The lower right image used the Crafter’s ink and the Basics paint. The other two used the Greetings Card ink and Basics paint for the upper right and Crawford & Black for the left one.
As for the most part you are going to only have ONE CHANCE to get a good result, this might just be a little too frustrating to actually try to justify as a technique. To my mind, if 90% of people, using 90% of common variations on the basic supplies can’t get a good result at LEAST 50% of the time, it just might be filed away as interesting, but annoying and potentially wasteful.
NOTE: Might be worth reading the next post before you embark on the stamping technique!
I have not really felt up to much crafty play for quite a while. BUT I have been dreaming about the Gelli plate and remembering how much fun it was to play with. I watched a video – well more than one, I’m sure – about resist transferring of a magazine image on to the plate, which you then pull off by doing a basic, heavy-bodied paint pull. This one is the first one I saw, I think.
There was mention in some videos about the combination of the ink and glossy paper quality making a big difference. Looking thru may magazines, which are mostly scrapbooking ones, I came across my ancient Rubberstampmadness mags.
The paper seemed thick and glossy and it also seemed that the image weren’t fashion shots but art and stamp samples.
There are a lot of stamp catalogs full of cool images, and some printed art work, like the BEAUTY image here that would all make very cool prints or additions to other art.
And guess what? They worked a treat.
One video mentioned that some people had success with printing on an ink jet printer and doing the same process. I did not. I tried printing on pain paper, photo paper, on coated matt cardstock, on sticky label paper, etc. etc. and nothing worked.
So that gave me a bit of an idea. If I stamped on to the glossy paper, might that transfer? I experimented with about 8 different inks and a stamp. The ones I had the highest hopes for (Archival Ink, Clearly Better clear stamp ink, Staz-on and Memento) were all fails. Not expecting much I tried Distress ink, Distress Oxide ink, Adirondack and Kaleidoscope. Also all fails.
Just on a whim I tried PIGMENT ink. Crazy, but it worked.
I did have a few fails using cheaper paint but the Basics was good pretty much every time.
The process is simple.
1. Stamp the image using pigment ink. Get a good coating of ink on the stamp.
Sorry for the poor quality there – I had already used the image before I realized the photo was crap. Doh! I suspect things like Versamagic or maybe even chalk ink MIGHT work, and COLOUR pigment ink will add a different dimension to it if it works! – I’ll try that next and see. But this is very generic black pigment ink.
I let the image dry but when I tried to dry it with the heat gun then transfer it, it didn’t work. So I think the ink needs to by dry-ISH but not super dry.
2. Roll the paint onto the gelli plate. I find the darker colours work best for this stage. You need a thin coat but not too thin. Press the stamped image into the paint – I burnished one with a teflon spreader. one with my fingernail, one with a spoon. Just make sure you get good contact.
LET IT DRY.
Remember the old Creative Palette that I hated? I used one of the bits to roll out the white paint and get a thin coat on the brayer. But you can also load the brayer by rolling in in paint on scrap paper. Not too thick a coat.
As mentioned in a few of the videos, if you can SEE the image slightly, it’ll be a good print. Pull it. Give the back a good rub.
And the coolest thing is that the text from the magazine transfers too!
I am so happy to have had a play. It was seriously fun. And now I know I can use my stamps as well as magazine images I am looking forward to more playtime!
It has been SOOOOOO long since I got to do any sort of crafty thing except knitting (which is portable and that is the only reason I can squeeze that in!) so I am super excited to be able to add a fun project. I love it, even if it was a ton of work to accomplish. And the one day I sit down to actually craft I get non-stop interaction from my darling Hubby (to be fair, he is trying to sort out my desk phone so I shouldn’t complain) and deliveries that need signing for, and gutter cleaners needing input, etc etc etc.
Anyway, I had noticed these 3D animal head craft kits at Lidl for like £2. I think there were a few options, but I only got three – the deer, a ram and an elephant. I think there was maybe a bear and something else. As soon as I saw them in the flyer last week I mentally noted that I needed to go on Sunday to get them. Then I promptly forgot. DOH! I was in Lidl yesterday to get a few things and I thought I would check the section that has the “last week’s” stuff. And lo and behold they had a stack of them! Woo hoo.
It’s all punch out, super simple but lots of pieces
See?
Size-wise it is about 13 inches across
Now, given the base is white, I could have streamlined the process a LOT by pulling the prints right onto the pieces, but that seemed dangerous. If I screwed up a print, I would ruin the whole piece. Instead, I went back to my stash of prints (recently unearthed in my ongoing office sort) and started matching up prints to pieces. The pieces are numbered on the back so easy to see what will be next to what
I did the base piece using this weird paper – thick and almost foam-y in texture, with a wood print on it – than my DH’s Aunt sent, wrapper around a gift. I’ve been hoarding it.
and I inked the backs, except the big piece that included the antlers.
You can’t see the number at all once the ink is on so I had to be a bit more organized than I usually am.
I also covered the antlers in a similar but darker foam-y paper and that worked much better than the light version would have. AND I backed it with some quite thick black cardstock. Cutting that was a pain but it made it all much more stable.
I inked the edges or dragged a fat marker around, and…..
ta da!
So hard to get a decent photo that really shows its loveliness!
What a palaver! You may recall that the other day I was trying to find a tutorial for a folded Origami corner to create a cube. I found it but the person who originally asked for it found a different version of it – that one matched what seemed to be the method I mentioned (from a no-longer-available HGTV tutorial.) Well, the written “instructions” (and I use that term very loosely – having MADE one it makes sense, but they are pretty sketchy if you don’t do a lot of origami!) were there but the two accompanying videos were not. It wasn’t much like the original one she showed a photo of, but did a similar thing in an easier way, resulting in a much more stable end product.
I am glad I watched it when I first saw it cause for some reason I can’t make the video load – not here, not on YouTube, not on Pinterest. I am going to leave it in place as it might just be a temporary blip but if it DOES come back I would highly recommend watching that video, if you are a visual learner. It’s very good. I’m adding step-by-setp photos because I am using a Gelli print on heavier than scrapbooking paper and there is one extra step that I found helped. And I changed how you do the bottom of the cube so it sits flatter.
I am not using 6 x 6 squares to begin with. That makes sense if you are using scrapbooking paper, cutting a 12 x 12 sheet into four equal squares, but I am using a print from an 8 x 10 Gelli plate. There is a basic ratio for the elements so you can adjust them to make a cube of any size.
Size of starting square = X
Size of cube sides = 1/2 X
Size of insert = 1/2 X minus a sliver off two adjacent sides
Size of hinge = 1/2 X minus 1 1/8 inch
So starting with a 7 inch square
Size of starting square : 7 inches (X)
Size of cube sides: 1/2 X = 3 1/2 inches
Size of insert: 1/2 X minus a sliver off two adjacent sides = 3 1/2 inches minus a sliver off two adjacent sides
Size of hinge : 1/2 X (3 1/2) minus 1 1/8 inch= 2 3/8 inches
Starting with an 8 inch square
Size of starting square : 8 inches (X)
Size of cube sides: 1/2 X = 4 inches
Size of insert: 1/2 X minus a sliver off two adjacent sides = 4 inches minus a sliver off two adjacent sides
Size of hinge : 1/2 X (4 inches) minus 1 1/8 inch= 2 7/8 inches
Jeez – Math. Ugh. Hope I got it right!
1. Print five or six Gelli Prints on 120 to 160 gsm cardstock (lightweight) – I did five and made the bottom of the cube solid. Cut your prints (or paper/card) down to a square (mine are 7 x 7)
2. Cut 12 hinges and 6 inserts to match your print size.
Insert = 3 1/2 inches minus a sliver off two adjacent sides
Hinges = 2 3/8 inches
Fold the hinges in half on the diagonal
3. Fold all six of the 7 inch squares the same:
Fold in half then unfold
Fold the two sides in to meet the middle fold then unfold
Rotate and repeat – at the last unfold you will see the sheet creased into 16 squares
Flip the square so the PATTERN SIDE is UP. Fold each corner into the middle and unfold
Flip PATTERN SIDE DOWN . Add a bit of double-sided adhesive in the four corners then fold each corner in to meet the closest score line
Fold the two sides in to the middle
You will now collapse this. But use your bone folder (or blunt butter knife or fingernail) to really crease each fold. This is more important on the heavier paper
Pull downward at the V
Crease along the sides INSIDE the box
Push the top part down to collapse and meet the first V
and again crease well – with the thicker paper and the extra thickness of the paint, this will help avoid the gaping corners I got to begin with.
In that shot all but the top right corner have been creased over. Trust me, when you do it you will see what I mean.
Phew. I bet you are now thinking my advice to watch the video wasn’t such a bad idea, right? LOL!
4. Once you have folded all six sides, slip the inserts into the middle to help provide structure to the piece. If you are adding photos, stick them to the inserts NOW – it will be hard to add them to the completed cube.
You can wait till after step 11 – when the cube is assembled but not yet fully stuck together – and pull the sides slightly away to slip a photo in, and SKIP adding the adhesive if you want a cube that you can change the photos in.
I haven’t done that step yet cause I’m not sure what photos I’ll be using. I’ll probably just cut the photos to fit within the insert area, leaving a bit of a border, and stick them to the insert after the cube is constructed. WATCH the video – I am pretty sure I recall her talking about making a template for cutting the photos.
Here are all the elements – might have one hinge off to the side 🙂 and you can see the black base is reversed so the flat/no insert side is UP
5. Add a strip of double-sided adhesive across each hinge valley
6. Peel off the paper backing (or not, if using the ATG) and slip a hinge into one of the side gaps
Press firmly to adhere it well.
7. Slip another side onto the other side of the hinge. Make sure the diamond-shaped insert is facing OUTWARD. Carry on adding the sides in this way till you have THREE joined pieces. Add a hinge to BOTH side-gaps of the fourth piece and sip the two hinges in to create the cube sides, like so:
8. For the solid bottom, reverse the hinges so the insert diamond is facing up, and insert all four hinges like so:
9. For the TOP, insert all four hinges with the insert facing DOWN. See the difference?
This gives you a flat bottom rather than the bumpy insert for the cube to rest on. I figured that I could lose one photo area so the cube sat more solidly on a flat surface.
10. Insert the TOP of the cube first. This way you can reach inside it and press the adhesive down fully. It’s more important that the top is stuck precisely than the bottom, as you will see it more.
11. Close the cube by slipping the bottom hinges into the last remaining gaps.
At this point you can still loosen the sides enough to slip in your photos. Stop here if you want to be changing photos to update this cube, rather than making another one. The cube will be a little less tight, solid and square but it’ll still be mostly ok.
Finally, add a bit of paper-backed adhesive (or, I suppose, wet adhesive if you prefer) INSIDE, on BOTH sides of each hinge, to make a really tightly stuck, solid and neat cube! Once you do this there will be no slipping in or out of photos, trust me.
Ta da!
You could use a contrasting or more purposeful Gelli print bit instead of a photo and while it was a little fiddly, cutting them to about 3 1/4 x 3 1/4 let me slip them into the corners after construction.
And I had this kicking around – one of the Spellbinders die D-lites cut without the frame – so I just slipped it in over the white insert. Cute!
And if you really did read that all, I’ll bet next time I say WATCH THE VIDEO you will do it LOL!
I often start something without a clear idea of the final outcome. I mean I have an IDEA, but not a vision of the final piece. I tend to riffle thru my stash and the debris on my desk and that leads me where the piece wants to go. Problem is I have a LOT of stuff, but I never seem to have EXACTLY what I see in my head. For example, I like embossed resist papers – I don’t own a single one. I love big swirls, but I’ve pretty much used up all the chipboard ones I’ve acquired over the years. When I think Oh that would work there… I am then too lazy or too engrossed in the process to stop, switch gears, and make something specifically for the piece I am working on. And my pockets are just not deep enough to buy everything I would like to have on hand.
Thinking about stuff I wish I had, I thought I would take a day and MAKE things that I know I will use, get them all ready to go and then when I think a lovely swirl will fill that space perfectly… I just grab it.
So I did two things. First I grabbed lots of plain white heavy cardstock. I stamped a bunch of border stamps and embossed them with white embossing powder. I made a couple of sheets, mixing up thin and fat borders.
Now, when I am layering up clusters of papers and embellishments, and I think a little embossed resist strip will add just the texture I want, I only have to grab the sheet, cut out one, spritz with a bit of ink to match….
then maybe stamp over it with some Distress ink. That whisks away from the embossing, and the strip is ready to tuck into a layered group.
For a selection of swirls and some die cut border pieces (if I want more texture) I went to my Cricut mini and Craft room. I figure as long as I am cutting, why not make a morning of it? LOL!
I set up the mat and went crazy.
I also did a mat of borders and one of banners. Then I thought to myself should I cut two of each to stick together, for a more chipboard-like piece? When I mist or ink or paint these they are going to droop and flop, even out of heavy heavy card. I had an idea. A bit like the acrylic medium technique for sealing things, I thought why not seal them with a coat of Gesso? It will give them a little more body and then they will be ready for adding to mixed media style things in my file folder book.
I brayered the Gesso on to the Gelli plate and laid on the piece – yes, I know the bigger plate would make more sense, but the small one was what was on my desk. Told you I was lazy….
Brayering over the back coated both sides. In the end I had a stack of them drying.
I didn’t waste the Gesso either. I pulled a print off the plate and used the spray inks on it. Cool.
I like the shadow effect where there is no Gesso. I’m sure I’ll find a use for it…
And I still have the waste from the cut-outs. They will surely work for stencils and the cardstock is thick enough they will work with modelling paste as well, at least a few times as they are in no way washable!
I know it’s a calculated risk, cutting and stamping a bunch of stuff that I might not use, but I feel that by thinking thru my style, and my process , I’ve identified those things I most often wish I had on hand. That makes it more likely I WILL actually use them. We shall see. I have plans for one of the swirls already and I’m interested in how the coating of gesso will affect it…
Oh and I forgot to mention…that doily sort of thing on the embossing sheet? That is actually a cup coaster!
It would have worked FAR better had I used a flat stamp mount (which it clung to perfectly) rather than the curved one that I grabbed cause it was on my desk (see? LAZY!) I’ve never gotten the hang of the darn thing and never get a good clean impression. I think I got a set of 4 of these for a couple of quid. It’s a little girlie for me, but it might work. I may cut out the centre circle with the dots around it as that would make a cute stamp too on it’s own. …
I just wanted to quickly share a couple of things. First the spray inks when printed using the Acrylic medium. I sprayed them with water and they do smear a little but not as much as plain in does. In fact, I rather like the misty effect.
Next, I thought I would share a print or two made on a pretty dirty plate – the plain one was pulled thru the stencil and it pretty much masked the grunge on the plate, but the black grid on the ghost is the leftover from the star-masks from a couple of days back. Nifty!
Closer:
Next, the Spreecasts continue – yesterday there was one on what Julie calls Stendoodling (using stencils to doodle, both in creating the shape to doodle IN and/or to create the doodling. I just did a simple pattern, using punchinella to do the small circles within the larger circles of the stencil and doing some lines. I quite like it, although haven’t quite finished it. Another thing to play with a bit more.
I still want to find a face stencil I can cut to play with another technique (she calls her Zombie Girl) from the Face stencil Spreecasts. If I like the process I may have to buy the real stencils!
So much fun. After briefly playing yesterday I was flooded with ideas to try so this morning I cleared a space on my desk and had some fun.
A couple of things – as I said yesterday, I am quite sure I read someplace that using inks on the plate was not recommended as it could stain it. To be honest, I’m not bothered about having a pristine plate, but even so my gut feeling is that a clean plate and an oiled plate will make the process work better. I THINK that both the oil and the acrylic medium sort of protect the plate from allowing the ink to really sink in to it. But even if it DID, the baby oil cleaning will pull out any deeply embedded ink. But you have to decide if you want to risk it. All I can say is thus far I’ve not had any problems getting the plate clean when I’m done.
Let me start off by adding a bit of info regarding the acrylic medium options, from yesterday’s post. The medium seals, perhaps not totally, but significantly, the Dylusions spray inks. And that is what I’ve been using. Other inks may not work the same. I you think about it, when you pull a print, what is at the BOTTOM of the plate is going to end up on the TOP of the print. I haven’t taken photos, and my camera is recharging at the moment, but I did brush over those prints and while the ink does move a little, it isn’t anything LIKE as smeary as usually it would be. I’ll snap a photo r two when the batteries are fully juiced up.
Now, on to the further play.
The first idea came to me as I was looking at the very inky stencil. Stamping off the excess ink when you use a stencil in the normal way is a pretty well-known technique. But as I was looking at it I though Why can’t I put the stencil on the plate and both stamp off the ink and pull a print thru it at the SAME TIME? So that is exactly what I did. Now, I had used a letter stencil and we all know how they need to be reversed to read right when you pull a print. Obviously the ink was on the wrong side, but I still did it.
Bearing in mind I tried to be quick once I had the idea, but I wasn’t lightning fast. The ink was already starting to dry. Even so I got a reasonable ghost print by removing the stencil and pulling the paint as well as the ink that squidged into the paint from making the first print.
That told me, in theory, that the process would work. So I thought about the steps and the best way to get set up.
1. I cleaned the plate and got the brayer clean and ready.
2. I squeezed out a dollop of paint onto the plate but didn’t roll it out.
3. I sprayed the stencil
4. I rolled out the paint QUICKLY and popped the inky stencil, ink up, on the plate then pulled the print.
That pulled the ink off the stencil and the paint thru the stencil at the same time, giving me my two-layer print. Again, the ink from the stencil migrated to the painted surface and once I pulled off the stencil I could pull the ghost.
I felt like light paint would look best but then I saw that metallic gold tube from the circles AJ page a few days back. I decided to use more of a mask, so I sprayed the ink onto one of my home-cut ones. This is cardstock covered with contact paper, then cut out, so the ink really beads up.
It didn’t matter at all. Oh, and I also pressed some plastic canvas into the paint to texture it before laying on the inky mask.
When I pulled the print the ink spread to fill the areas where it had beaded up, as well as oozing into the paint on the Gelli plate.
So cool! and the ghost print is just crying out to become something, but I don’t know what yet!
Of course I then had to try a dark paint – well, red, anyway. I did the same basic process for the first pull – although I think I went to heavy on the brown and to light on the yellow. Still, nice enough
But then, before I removed the stencil, I sprayed on a bit more yellow ink thru the stencil. THEN I removed it and pulled that print.
Like that one a lot too!
I’ve got a couple more things to try/show but this is already very long and photo heavy so I’ll stop it there. I would really love to see any play you get up to with this so do drop me a comment and add a link. Have fun…..
OK, so I’ve been watching Julie Fei-Fan Balzer and her free stencil classes on Spreecast. I’ve done a few of her online classes and always enjoy them. She has been doing a Q&A at the end and one thing that comes up often is using spray inks on the Gelli plate.
When I first got mine, I remember reading, probably on the Gelli Arts site, that ink will stain the plate. When I only had the 6×6 plate I worried I might ruin it, so I was more cautious that is my way. Now I have the 8×10 as well, I feel a little less worried I might do something and ruin my plate! Plus, discovering the baby oil when massaged into the plate will lift out any deeply embedded colour, I know I can clean it up with ease. And that made me want to have a go.
Thinking things thru, as I do, I thought about using maybe paint as a base, then spraying the ink over that, but the colour of the paint would always affect the colour and at least for the first experiments I wanted to keep it pretty pure. So I went to my much-loved Acrylic medium. Rolled that out onto the plate first, to give the ink something to cling to rather than beading up instantly.
I was aiming for a very light spray – in fact I think I ended up with a bit more than I wanted.
You can see it does bead up a little, in the areas of the heaviest concentration of ink, but in the lighter areas the ink just floats on the top. I tried out a couple of stencils. It seems like an overall pattern without too much of the stencil squidging int the ink, produces the best end result
While I love the look of both of these, the right one, pulled thru the stencil, is pretty indistinct. The left one , pulled after the stencil was removed, is really smeary but still cool.
That stencil has small open areas and a lot of stencil. This one has more open areas, plus it’s covered with layers of paint so the stencil doesn’t slide around as much. I like both of these, but the print after removing the stencil ( left) is really cool.
See?
One thing I did try was then pulling a paint print over an ink print, masking off interesting areas so they show thru. Def. something fun to play with a lot more!
Clearly I’ve not perfected this quite yet, but you know me – I always share my experiments as I go. Now I want to think on it a little more and see where I want to take it….
Bet you thought I had abandoned it. Nope. Just a lot of layers that all needed drying in between. Perfect for a day when I am awaiting a re-delivery of a package (sadly, not for me LOL!)
I took the print of layered masked Gelli-print circles that was on my desk yesterday and covered it with the acrylic mists in Brown Spice. That filled in all the gaps of plain paper and even the little bits that were left as plain paper after printing.
Using my Stabilo All pencil I carefully outlined the circles, taking care to try to work backwards so the top-layer circle is most completely outlined and the circles “below” it are not, if that makes sense.
A whisk of a damp brush brings it all to life.
I Gessoed a two-page spread in my AJ and stuck this piece off centre but across the page-divide. From there is was all layering of stencils.
I paid the most attention to the outline of the stuck on piece, to try to unify it and the background as best I could
I added some bottle-top circles, some stamping, some of my modelling paste thru a thick stencil (yep, 2 weeks and it’s still not dried out in the slightest) and the printed text/quote. All very intentional (56 is my age, hovering there over “this generation”) placement. The quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson and is part of a longer one:
The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul.
I may still opt to add the first part, I’m still undecided!
You can see the spatters too – always add them.
The very light looking circles are stamped with Silkies and don’t look quite so distinct unless the light catches them at just the right angle – like it did in the photo. I’ll probably add a bit of something over that bit at the top to unify it a bit more too.
Probably won’t journal-around-the-edge on this one, although I might use the stuck-on piece as the journal lines. I wonder will it make it seem more a part of the whole or make it stand out more? It’ll depend on whether or not I opt to add the rest of the quote….
