Embrace Today by Amanda Southern

 Hi Everyone

This week I have been scavenging in my box of gelli prints and came across a print that I thought would be ideal to do some colouring in on.

I love my gelli plate and love nothing more than spending, what can turn into many hours, pulling prints using many different methods. You soon accumulate a huge pile of prints that you can stash away so you have a good supply to choose from.

Here’s What I Did:-

From my stash of gelli prints I selected one to use for this project. This particular print is a 3 stage print. Those stages are first to lay your choices of acrylic paint colours onto the Gelli Plate with a brayer and take a pull of that paint. Next brayer black acrylic paint all over the Gelli Plate and lay down your chosen stencil. Take a plain piece of copier paper and lay it over the stencil, burnish on top of this with your brayer and your fingers as you are looking to remove the paint from the open area’s of the stencil. Keep checking that you have removed enough paint before then removing the stencil, the black paint will remain where the plastic of the stencil covered it up. Return back to your paper that you took the first coloured pull of paint with and lay it over the Gelli Plate burnish again to ensure that you pick up all the black paint remaining on your Gelli Plate.

You can see most of the print here before I coloured it in. I love how you get irregular patterns in the paint. 

I then decided to add a little colour by using colouring pencils to colour in some of the flowers, blending shades of the same colour family with some white for highlights. The majority of colouring pencils work brilliantly over acrylic paint and in particular the Spectrum Noir pencils that I have used here. To improve the blending I also use a paper stump with Spectrum Noir Blending Solution.

To finish this off I then stencilled black modelling paste through another stencil applying with a palette knife, this was to just add a focal point and further texture.

Then I cut it to the required size and matted onto black card and then an 8” x 8” card blank.

What I Used:-

8” x10” Gelli Plate

Speedball 4” Brayer

Acrylic Paints of your choice

Donna Downey Stencil – Peonies

Spectrum Noir Pencils

Spectrum Noir Blending Solution

Paper Stumps

PaperArtsy Stencil by Lin Brown – 024

Black Texture Paste – I’ve used Wendy Vecchi but DecoArt Black Modelling Paste is similar

Palette Knife

Black Card

Card Blank

If you’ve never tried colouring in some of your gelli prints give it a go and if nothing else the colouring in process is very therapeutic.

Have a great week and see you next Tuesday

Love

Amanda X