Assorted Gelli Prints

I've been working a little on gelli prints with both my round and my rectangular gelli prints. I've been using flowers and leaves in the prints. 

Continuous Line Sketch & Gelli Prints

 For the Creative Spark Scavenger Hunt I did a continuous line sketch of fruit, a bowl, eyeglasses, and a vegetable peeler.

I have been doing some gelli prints using leaves and flowers that I've found outside. They seem to work best on a light colored preprinted page.

 

Printmaking

It seems like my art groups are getting me involved in printmaking. Last week the South Bay Art Association did gelli prints at our monthly meeting. I haven't done any in a long time so it was fun to play around with them. Luckily I brought my own brayer and some supplies, because the brayers they supplied were soft foam and didn't work well. Some of the members had done gelli prints before but the members who hadn't tried it before were a little lost. There was really no instruction, so I tried to help the members near me who looked lost. It wasn't a really conducive atmosphere to do prints because of the crowd, but we had fun talking and seeing some of the results people got.

Here are the three prints I made.  

Here I am with my creations.

Then last night the Patchogue Sketch Club also did prints. We will be doing some sort of print making for a few weeks. We used styrofoam as a print plate this time, carving into it with a ballpoint pen. People got some interesting designs and most of the prints came out pretty nice. Here is my print and the ghost print. I had to remember that the lettering has to be carved backwards so it will print the right way.

Tulip Party

Jerry bought me a tulip plant for Easter. Things got busy but I managed to sketch them before they started to droop. 

As they started to sag I tried using them for prints on my gelli plate. The flowers fell apart when I pressed them down on the plate. I'm sure it would work better with fresher flowers and maybe different colors. This time it worked better than the first time I tried. I had 6 tulips so I was able to do 3 prints. I like the way the dark image and the colored background came out.

Here are my results starting with what I feel is the best of the three.

Gelli Printing

My closet and brain are filled with different projects I keep saying I'm going to try. I've watched a lot of videos on gelli botanical prints and thought I'd give it a try. I collected some dried flowers and leaves to use. I got mixed results with this technique and it seems that dried flowers and leaves tend not to be the best items to use. They tend to leave behind seeds and residue that stays behind in the paint and affects the print. I'll have to try again with fresher items. Here are the prints I did.

This one was my favorite because the dark undercolor showed the most.

This one didn't have enough of a design from the items.

This was done with dried flowers but I couldn't press them down enough to get paint between the individual flowers. The flowers were too tick.

This one was done with more pliable leaves but it didn't leave enough of an imprint
inside the larger shapes.

Parts of this came out better than the others, but the technique still needs work.

            I will have to give this another shot. I kept the paints and gelli plate out so I can try again.