Gelli Plate Printing for Beginners
- By Joan
- September 18, 2024
- No Comments
Gelli Plate Printing for Beginners
If you watch art videos on Youtube enough, eventually you’ll get to Gelli Printing. And if you even watch one Gelli Printing video, AI will assume you want to see all of the gelli printing videos. And if you watch all of those gelli printing videos , you’ll eventually decide, that looks easy enough, you are just going to have to try it.
That’s the point I was at when I ordered my first gelli mat from Amazon. I had wanted to suggest to my kids to get me a gelli mat either for mother’s day or my birthday but nobody asked so I went out on my own and bought it myself. I can’t complain, they always have their own wonderful gift ideas . 😀
To get started the only other thing you’ll probably have to purchase besides a mat, is some kind of brayer, the thing that looks like a small paint roller.
Hopefully you have on hand some copy paper, baby wipes and assorted paints.
Surround yourself with all your supplies and dab a few blobs of paint onto your gelli mat. You don’t need a lot.
Spread out the paint evenly with your brayer. It looks better (at least to me) if you don’t overmix the paints. The paint should not be gloppy.
If you want your paint to have a little texture, press some household objects into the paint such as this bubble wrap.
Take a clean piece of copy paper and lay it over the painted gelli mat. Press evenly with the palm of your hand to soak up that beautiful paint.
Gently pull off your paper and you’ve made your first print.
Use a clean, side piece of paper to run your brayer on to get rid of the excess paint.
To make leaf prints over top of that initial print, paint your gelli mat again in a contrasting color.
Place your leaves over the wet paint.
With the leaves in place, lay your initial print back over the leaves. Once again, press evenly and firmly with your full hand.
Pull your paper up part ways, leaving some of it in place so it can be laid back down exactly where it is now. Peel off the leaves.
Note: If I had done this step on a separate piece of paper I could have gone back and just gotten the leaf veining on my background. So many ways to layer and play around with the paints.
The peeled off leaves will leave behind the veining.
Lay the paper back down. press down firmly with your hand, and your print will pick up the remainder of the leaf veining.
Repeat for the other side.
I was playing around with paints, background colors and textures.
Clean off your gelli paint with the baby wipes and you’re ready to begin again or store the gelli mat for another day.
These prints were cut in half and mounted in blank 4×6 note cards.
Leave the 8×10 print full size and you’ll have a beautiful, one of a kind, piece of wall art.
After a little more playing, these are some of my final prints. Don’t ask me what colors I used because I really have no idea, just a little squirt here and a little squirt there. You may want to start with any inexpensive acrylic paints you have on hand and as you get the hang of it upgrade to better paints and better paper.
Also, if you wish to print leaves you might want to get started now, before the fall.
Hope you enjoyed this little craft project. Until next time, stay inspired.
You can find more of my crafty projects, non furniture, here.
BTW, these are a couple of the tutorials I watched on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvrouyTnm_I, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqUX2JN721Q, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSAo6Z4LiOs.
Copyright © 2024
Leave a Reply