Excellent Weather for Mono-Printing...Not

The best weather for mono-printing with the Gelli Arts® gel plate is a cold rainy day. Winter days like this mean the paint dries slowly and you have plenty of time for mark-making. Unfortunately today in Perth is over 40C and it's almost impossible to make good gel prints. My paint was drying almost instantly on the plate. I decide to embrace this and use techniques where I deliberately let paint dry on the plate. I didn't have to wait long!

All these prints are made the same way on the 12 by 14 inch plate. First a colour (or a mixture of colours) is rolled onto the plate and textured. By the time this is done the heat has made the paint nearly dry and pulling a print is very disappointing. The trick is to just leave the paint until it's bone dry and then use PanPastels to add more colour in any areas where there is no paint. The next step needs to be done super fast in this weather: A very thin layer of white paint is rolled over the top and the paper immediately placed on top and rubbed down. Now here's the trick (it took me AGES to work this out!)....do not take the paper off right away. Leave it until the paint is TOTALLY dry. About 5 minutes in this heat but you could leave it for hours if you wanted to.

I know you're thinking that the paper gets stuck to the plate, which it would do if you tried this with a single paint layer. What seems to happen is the second layer of white paint acts like a glue between the dried paint/pastels and the paper. The dry paint/pastel makes a barrier between the paper and the plate. Its important to make sure that all the paint has some pastel over it to fill in any tiny gaps in the paint layer. The paper doesn't stick to the plate but it does stick to the dry paint and the pastel. When you pull the paper off your gel plate is almost totally clean!

I'm aiming to show a forest reflected in a lake. perhaps a bush-fire is raging through the trees? You can see I got better at this as I went along, these were the first 2 I tried.

Of course I'm going to have to try this on fabric! Watch this space.