Day 21 – Image Resist #birgitkoopsengelprintingchallenge is one of my favourite ways to use my Gelli plate and I usually get good results, but a lot depends on the quality of the magazine. I made quite a few of these because I really love the technique and the magazine I was using had some great images!
Quick Overview of Process and Results…
It’s really important to get a good quality magazine to work with and by that I mean, you will need some nice glossy, weighty pages, like you would get with an expensive fashion magazine. Magazines with thin pages will probably not work at all. I think it also has something to do with the actual printing process and inks used in some of these magazines. This magazine was one I found at the bottom of a pile and it’s a few years old, but it had some great photos to work with. All of these prints are from that one magazine. Before I found this one, I found an old Prima magazine that had a great photo of a Brenda Blethyn and I really wanted to use that one, but unfortunately, very thin (cheap) paper in the magazine resulted in no printing what so ever!
The above photo was the first one I tried from the good quality mag, and I used a very light turquoise acrylic paint and it worked great. Then I thought I’d try this one with the woman reading the book. Again with a similar colour.
That one worked great too! One of the good things about printing this way, is that text will be printed the right way round because you are copying exactly what is on the page. So if you had a nice typography page, that would look awesome.
This time, still using the same mag, I found this photo of a Geisha from a travel feature about Japan. I took a few photos of the process which I will share below:
Here are a few more photos from my Insta – scroll through and you will see that I was also able to pull multiple prints from the same magazine page, using different coloured acrylics!
The challenge
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 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.
PROJECT RECIPE:
Gel Plate
Old glossy magazines
Acrylic Paints – various
Variety of paper from stash
Oh wow Elle! I love these! I especially love that one of the lady reading the book.