A Circle of Stories (Let the gelliplate printing madness begin!)

The week began with a square, let's end it with a circle :) 
I held off as long as I could, but when I saw an 8" inch round gelli plate being offered on Marktplaats for 1/2 the retail price a few weeks ago, I just could not resist and got it! And the gelli plate printing madness begun!

After you-tubing tutorials some fun tutorials, I just got out my Amsterdam Acrylic paints and got to work. This is the first print I pulled with a stencil from my Ed Roth 201 book. This book has some amazing stencils and the concentric circles work really well with the round plate. And it's really true what they say, once you get to printing, you just cannot stop!

I played around with a lot of different stencils and paints. I printed most of them on smooth 80gms double A premium printing paper and I used Canson Tracing paper to rub over stencils to take some paint away. I still had a giant roll of this paper from my days working at an office supply store in college.It's just as smooth as deli paper but of a much better quality.

Then I noticed on the group Creative Collage on Swap Bot, a swap "Gimme a circle" hosted by Artsynerdgirl which would be the perfect swap to use one of my mono prints as base for. The swap requirements were to add all circle elements to your collage and include 3 different other media to your work. I picked out some great stamps from Dyan Reaveley Dylusions Around the Edge set, some round office supply stickers, my tombow markers, my scalloped 1"inch paper punch, some staz-on and memento inks and got to work.

I stamped one of the ladies from the Couture Collection With The right Hat on a piece of the tracing paper, colored her in with tombow markers, cut her out in circle form and added to the collage.I felt like this needed a quote and added the following to the piece:

"We are all joined in a circle of stories" stamped with the Handlettering script alphabet stamps I also used in my midori April overview. I doodled around the edges with a sharpie, sealed with artist medium and that is all she wrote! My partner still has to receive this piece but hopefully she will enjoy it. I definitely enjoyed making this! I love the gelli print and recently joined the mixed media artists and The Printing Shop groups on swapbot to make more use of mono prints in my swaps. I also did a number of journal pages with my prints and will show you those in a next post. 

Do you have a gelli plate? Share a link to a work you have made with it, I would love to see it! At some point I definitely want to try this image transfer technique Bridget Koopsen showed on the gelliarts blog. I don't print a lot of photo's anymore, and only have an inkjet printer, but I have a bunch of older art pictures I "dumpster dived" lying somewhere which can be used for use! All in good time...

Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!

namasté