Spring Daffodils, Gelli Arts Printing, and a Breakthrough
Spring finally reached New York City and there are daffodils everywhere along the streets and avenues. The tulips are just getting ready to bloom - they will be next week's paintings.
Yesterday Teri, Pat, and Benedicte joined me at my dining room table for another play day making prints with Gelli Arts plates. Here is a photo taken at the height of our printing - 4 plates, lots of paints, and numerous stamps, stencils, and other texturing tools.
I don't especially like acrylic paints and need to experiment with different pens so I can draw over acrylics without immediately ruining each pen. But I love making the prints, so I'm open to any and all suggestions for pens that you use successfully. I can use a dip pen and India ink, but then I can't transport my tools easily because of fear of ink stains.Teri suggests Souffle and Glaze pens and gave me a Sharpie to try (Poster Paint). This is one of the acrylic prints I made - using color copy paper.
But then I decided that I really needed to try to make a print with watercolor paint. I have an inexpensive set of Reeves tube paints that Sydney uses with me and I used them in the same way that I used the craft acrylic paints. I deliberately used a stencil, a stamp, sequin waste, and corrugated cardboard to texture the paint on the Gelli plate for my test and here is what printed!!
I was so excited that I made several more - printing one of them in my current watercolor sketchbook.
Last night I painted several more daffodils over the watercolor Gelli print using Winsor-Newton Gouache paints! I am super-execited! Now I can play with media and tools that I like better. What other cheap, tube watercolors should I try??
Comments
The daffodils are precious! :) I love looking at group projects like that
Posted by: Alex Tan | April 18, 2013 5:12 PM
Hi Shirley. I'm responding to your EDM post. What great prints you've made. I love Gelli plates but I'm not sure they'd work with watercolours because I believe they need quite a thick medium to be effective. I wonder if gouache might work?
Posted by: Angie Willis | April 19, 2013 5:13 AM
Shirley, did we try gouache yet?
Love these pages.
Posted by: teri Flemal | April 19, 2013 7:28 AM
Looks great fun, I love experimenting with paint!
Posted by: cathy holtom | April 21, 2013 3:51 PM
I love my Gelli Plate ... and I love watercolours. I played using Artbars (which are water based) and really took to the more unpredictable results.
To draw on top of my acrylic Gelli prints I used a mixed media approach (rather than ruin pens!) and drew/painted on either tissue paper or tracing paper and then glued over.
I heartily recommend Derwent water based pencils/products (Artbars, inktense, aquatone, graphitint, metallics, watercolour .... a vast range!) for painting on prints with if you want to try something else different :-)
I think the muted colours of your print, its layout and then the daffodils on top is just gorgeous.
Posted by: Sarah | May 6, 2013 2:16 AM