My sister was here this past weekend and we played with the gelatin printing plate that I bought a while back. We hauled out all sorts of paint, marking tools, stencils and paper and got started. We had watched a couple of online video tutorials earlier in the day and we quickly realized that it was not as easy as it looks!! All in all, we were happy with most of our prints. She managed enough pieces to use in her next card making class and I have several sheets of background paper which will be added to the stash and used in future projects. We used old greeting cards, maps and brown paper as our substrates. We used glaze and acrylic paints for colour and a variety of items as stencils to make marks in the paint before we made a print.
The plate I bought is made by Stampendous and is about a quarter inch thick. It has a plastic protector on both surfaces. We just peel off one of them before we started printing. It worked reasonably well but I am wondering if the GelliArt plates work better because they are thicker and therefore a bit more flexible. It is possible that our results were more about the paint we were using rather than the surface. We will try it again and may have a better perspective then.
If you have not tried monoprinting, consider trying!! It is a lot of fun. You do not need a gelli plate to mono print - you can easily use a white garbage bag or a silicon sheet on your kitchen counter as your plate. I like the unique look of the papers that we created which I digitize for future use before I use them up!!
Therese
