more gel printing, anyone?

be a sport and say, "yes" ok... otherwise the whole rest of this post falls really flat. thanks! here ya go:

day 16: feathers

i used some cool 7gypsies acrylic feathers as masks and some pretty large real feathers to "stamp" with. i'm just going to skip over the part where i tried to use small feathers as masks, got them hopelessly entangled and spent a really long time picking all the wet, painty, broken feathery bits off my brayer.

day 17: letters 

i placed some ancient heidi swapp acrylic letters BACKWARDS on my gel plate as masks, then printed around them using the colors from color crush creative palette #39: happy dance

day 18: numerals

i altered a book and called it, "#31 days of gel printing" and you can see more of it in this post!

day 19: book paper

the background pattern is a stencil coated with clear gesso and rainbow shades of colorburst. the mandala is a rejected panel from my "emboss like a boss" class samples which really has nothing to do with gel printing, but it featured many of the same colorburst shades and looked really nice with the background, so i added it.

day 20: black and blue

this happened to fall the day before i was teaching my first "mixed media mandala" class which has a bit of gel printing with a small 3" round plate. so i made about 6 pages obsessively practicing the technique. and then added the stenciled vines on top to make it fancier, lol.

day 21: ghost prints

ghost prints are the second or third pulls of paint off the gel plate, in which generally there are some bits of paint missing. sometimes the paint is still damp and you just press another piece of paper on and get a lighter version. sometimes the paint is a bit dry, so you add a layer of cheap, runny craft paint to loosen it up and get something completely different. sometimes i let the leftover ink build up from a few different prints, then pull it all off in one. you never reallllllllly know what you're going to get, which is part of the fun. 

day 22: multiple layers

ordinarily, this would be my cue to use layers of paper and make a collage. but this time i used layers of paint, instead. my favorite part is the shadow under the butterflies, which i got by using the same stencil on two different layers and just kind of guessing where to place the paper the second time... and IT WORKED!

day 23: spray inks

i made my own spray inks by mixing colorburst and water in tiny spray bottles, the, spraying them onto a stencil spread with a bit of clear gesso. i love how it came out!

we're in the home stretch of the challenge, so i'm hoping to finish up posting the rest of the days tomorrow or monday! in the meantime, happy saturday! ♥