My new toy!

As you may recall, I am a Resident Artist over at "... And Then We Set It On Fire" which is a blog devoted to learning and using various Surface Design and fiber arts techniques.  This month, Judith DeMilo Brown is hosting, and she and 3 guest artists are covering how to use the  Gelli-Arts Gel Printing  plate.  I have been eyeing these for quite awhile, and this was my opportunity to dive in and get some first hand instruction on how to use them!
As you will read if you check out the posts this month, you can use acrylic paints or craft paints on paper and fabric.  But I am also planning to experiment with thickened dyes, although Gelli-Arts cautions that the gel plates will be stained by dyes.  I am not concerned with that, and really want to try dyes so I can see if they would be useful for dyeing clothing items.  But first, I need to get comfortable using the plate, so this morning, I decided to try using acrylic paints.  I didn't get a lot of pictures... this is a fast-paced technique since acrylics dry so quickly, but I did manage to get some:

Here is my work space.  I decided to use some fabrics from my stash that were various sized, and were probably (but not guaranteed to be!) cotton.  Since I am not using dyes here, I did not have to do any preparation of the fabric other than a quick press to remove wrinkles.  I had gathered some leaves and weeds from the yard to experiment with, but had other items on hand just in case I wanted to use them. 

This is the back of my first piece after I had loaded the plate with paints and placed some of the leaves.

Here is the first print; background is the plate with the leaf clusters still in place.

This is a ghost print of some fox tails in the foreground; in the back is the plate with some new colors waiting to be brayered.

Paint spread on the plate, waiting for the next step.

A print with some netting

  Here are the prints from the first session.  I'm very pleased with the upper right and both prints in the middle.  The others will work for backgrounds, and I'm not necessarily done with the ones I really like!  I will study these before trying the process with craft paints and thickened dyes, but I definitely think I will be doing a lot with my Gelli-Art plate in the coming months!