Sometimes I find printing with my gelli plate very confusing. There I said it.  Like trying to direct something while looking in the mirror, it is just a skill I do not have.  I still love to play with it though, even when I am not sure whether I am going to get a print with negative or positive colour! I really think this is sometimes when I get my best prints, when I am not sure what is going to happen.

I have seen some great prints lately using seed pods so I decided to use some dried honesty plant to make some pages of print and colour.

Firstly I decide on my colour palette and  in my mind I wanted these prints to be all blues and blue/greens which as you can see I strayed from a little.  This often happens when I get my paints out and start to put them together, some get taken out and some get added. I will sometimes paint a few sample splotches to see what looks best together.  For this session, I grabbed colours and got on with the prints.

The Gelli Plate I used is a 4″ circle which I can use directly onto my sketchbook pages.

My sketchbooks here are Ranger Dylusions creative journals small and large, some old music paper, a Moleskine Art Plus small sketchbook and an altered book which I use as a sketchbook and I primed with transparent gesso.

I like to have lots of paper and/or sketchbooks on hand to make many pages at once while I have the plate with paint on it.  Of course I don’t want to waste the paint, I want colour everywhere!

I started with the neon so that I can gauge how much bright I want and I can print over it if I gets too much.  I can never tell which way I will go with neon, love it or hate it.

Once the paint is rolled onto the plate I added some seeds and printed by placing the sketchbook directly onto the plate.

When all the ‘outside’ paint has been used in prints, I carefully remove the seeds so that I can make a positive print of the seeds and I also use the painty seeds to make little seed prints.

I use new seeds for each colour and the same process to get all the different print options. As I was getting lots of print opportunities from each colour I printed in all of my sketchbooks to make a variety of backgrounds.

I love the stick/branch images I got from the stalks of the dried plant in that grey circle.

To add more random colour to the pages I used the paint left on the breyer to roll colour onto parts of each page.

The music pages ended up with colour rolled onto them using the left over paint from the breyer and I like how the colours are together.  I had some bean pods which I used for the small sketchbook print in the middle of the picture above.

The question is, if these are backgrounds, what am I going to add?  Well, I am not sure right this minute, but I will share when I finish them.

Honestly!

Happy Wednesday  and happy creating x