hold the peanut butter

because it's ALL GELLI around here, during the third week of 30 days of gel printing with birgit koopsen via instagram!

day 14: texture

birgit showed a really cool technique to make your own texture blocks using a variety of foam and cardboard shapes. coincidentally my aunt had just given me half a box of self adhesive foam letters in truly ugly neon colors, which i came very close to tossing away. as it turned out, they made the perfect tool for this!

day 15: fall

i used the "color within color" technique where you're essentially lifting off some paint thru the stencil, then replacing it with a different color, so it looks sort of like stained glass. this one is a testament to how different a print looks when you add just a teeny bit of pen doodles on top.

day 16: yarn 

(mandala monday)

yarn (like lace) is a surprisingly good mask! above are my yarn-centric prints, and below is the mandala i made by using circle and heart punches on the dry prints and building the shapes into a mandala. 

day 17: texture plates

the name refers to some very cool specialty tools, which are a bit like rubber stamps, but unmounted and made specifically for gel printing. alas, i don't have any, lol. so i tried some embossed foam sheets (which kinda worked) a flat plate for building lego's on (worked really well) and my little hand made foam letter tool thingie (worked pretty well). i was also testing some chalk-like acrylic paints which are sort of cool, though they dry quite a bit faster than ordinary ones.

(due to time constraints and a surprise party we threw for my mom this week, i skipped over day 18: vegetables and day 19: complementary colors; hope to double back and get to those next week; but honestly i'm slightly shocked to have kept up as well as this anyway!)

day 20: felt tip pens

another technique i would never have tried if i wasn't participating in this challenge and checking out birgit's post most days! basically, you just color on the plate with kid markers... in this case i had laid down a background of pigment ink and colored thru a stencil. this is easy and fun, but don't attempt anything super formal because you definitely see the pen marks on the plate.