Birgit Koopsen IG Gel Printing Challenge – Day 1 Colors of Your Flag

Hello September! I’m so glad August is over (all those birthdays lol!) and I can move on to something new. This month on Instagram Birgit Koopsen (@birgit_koopsen) is holding a Gel Printing Challenge with fun daily prompts to make you get more out of your gel plate –  and there are giveaways from both Birgit and @gelliarts.  I love my gel plate and I don’t use it enough so I decided to join in.  Here are the prompts and the links if you want to join in too.  This image is from Birgit’s instagram page and IG has cut off her name from the bottom. so to see the photo and read about the challenge, click here.

Day One – Colors of Your Flag

I decided to go with Scotland and the Saltire flag, which gave me blue and white to play with.  I thought about the UK and the union jack but I didn’t want to use red and UK was too obvious, so let’s go more meta, and use the individual country I am currently in!

I used a couple of dark blues and white acrylic paints with a huge 12 inch stencil from TCW on my biggest gel plate, which around A4 size from memory, but I would have to check.  The paints I used were a Cobalt from Finnabair, and a Jane Davenport blue that doesn’t seem to have a name on it, but it’s from one of her sets of four.  The white was just some leftover white from a previous project, and quite a cheapie paint from amazon years ago.

I started by covering the plate with the blue and white paints, then laying down the stencil.  Pulled my first print with the stencil still on the plate, then took my second from the stencil itself, then took the rest of them after the stencil was lifted, and more paints were applied.  These papers were all roughly A5 size and one bigger A4 size that I hung up and left to dry and then forgot about its existence when it came time to take the photo, so it’s not shown in the above photo!  I’m loving this stencil too btw, and really need to get it out more!

PROJECT RECIPE:
Gel Plate
TCW – stencil
Acrylic Paints – blues and white
Assorted papers and card to pull prints