Last month I had three lovely ladies in my studio for a gel printing class.
As always, I started them with botanicals.
They're such a nice introduction to gel printing, especially for people who are just getting started. We played with positive and negative shapes, pulled ghost prints, and admired all those beautiful leaf shapes appearing on paper.
It was a three-hour class, and eventually we moved on to masks, stencils, and texture tools.
The funny thing is...
I was still so enthralled with the botanicals that I just kept using them.
One of the first texture tools I showed the group was bubble wrap.
I printed the texture behind the leaves and then added a pop of fluorescent red using different leaves as a mask.
I almost always end up sneaking a fluorescent color into my workshops somehow. 😄
On the next print, I started with a texture tool again, then picked up some copper paint and layered a stencil on top of it.
I liked the pattern so much that I grabbed a forsythia branch one of my students had brought and used the leaves as masks. Then I printed the ghost print right over the top.
I liked that one too. So naturally I did it again.
This time instead of going darker, I printed white on top to create the mask. Then came the ghost print.
And then...
fluorescent red.
Because it was sitting there.
And why not?
Maybe that's this week's tip.
You don't have to retire your botanicals when you move on to stencils or texture tools.
Sometimes the most interesting prints happen when you keep asking:
"What happens if I add one more thing?"
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