Mono-print Monday - Don't Clean Your Gelli® Plate

In the first Mono-Print Monday post I told you that if you are using the right amount of paint then your Gelli® plate should be almost clean after you take a print. Sometimes, however, you'll be a bit heavy handed on there will be paint left on the plate. You can also deliberately use a little more paint so some some remains after you've taken your first print.

Beginners often want to clean their plate between each print. I'm going to advise you not to clean your Gelli® plate! Why waste all that paint, especially if the patterns are nice?

The easiest way to collect up that paint is to just go ahead and take a second "ghost" print. If there is enough paint left on the plate you'll get a lighter and often nicer version of your first print.

I like to roll on even more paint over anything left over. In this way you get all the colours from before plus the new colour. The print at the top of the page is an excellent example of this. Only blue was applied to the plate. All the pink, orange and other colours were already there. This gives a much more interesting print than would have been obtained with just the 1 colour. Here's a sequence of prints; I started with orange and kept printing adding blue in subsequent layers. You can see I got both colours in the later prints.

Dirty plate, I rolled blue over next

The plate now has both colours

I keep on printing, the dirtier the Gelli® plate the better the prints usually turn out. You have to be careful, especially with complementary colours, not to mix them to a horrible mud colour. One way to avoid this is to let the paint on the plate dry before you roll a second layer. The new wet paint will pull up the paint beneath.

I used a stencil over the plate next. I put on single colours only but you can see the blue and other colours from before. 

With this one I added paints to the plate and let them dry before rolling over a yellow layer to pull everything off again.

Here are lots more. I'm decorating envelopes to use for sending art on Swapbot.

So unless you are looking for a very controlled, single colour print, don't clean your Gelli® plate. Leave the paint on and enjoy the surprise of making more prints on top.