From Gelli Plate to Card

The weekend was spent print making with the Gelli Plate.

After some so-so results using my crafter's acrylic paints on the Gelli Plate I bought some artist's paint which has a thicker consistency.  The first print off the plate when using the thinner crafter's acrylic, I'm often not  happy with, but it does give some amazing second or even third prints from the Gelli plate for a nice single print. 

The thicker artist's paint spreads over the plate much more evenly and uniform.  The first prints are more opaque than the crafter's acrylic and colours much more vivid, especially with black.  I found with these paints that the second prints were much fainter though - often too faint to see.

I played around with blues, black and white and used plastic masks with circles, sequin waste and paper die cuts.

Most of the prints made were four or five layers of printing.  I also used a coated cardstock, which, although not a typical for printmaking, kept its form really well and performed much better than other papers that I had previously tried.

One of the prints in particular, I thought would be perfect for a Father's Day Card.

The print was trimmed and the die cut that was used as a mask (which, by now painted black) was used to decorate the panel in the top left and bottom right corners.  This was matted onto black card and mounted onto white card stock.

A strip of black card was matted onto a black printed image and white die cut letters were added, before adding off-centre to the card with dimensional glue.

Looking at some of the creations by artists on a number of other blogs, there's still lots for me to learn with this technique, but I am having loads of fun having a go!