Making An Homage Print as a Family

I was given a larger gel plate for Christmas. The day after Christmas, I persuaded my family to do an homage print using techniques shown by Fulton Sim aka ArtWhisperer88 on YouTube. If you are learning about gel printing, his channel is really worth watching! I highly recommend you subscribe to his videos if you want to learn about making monotypes with a gel plate. 

I cut up a snack box to make shapes for family members to add to an inked plate. The shapes laid on top of an inked plate will block the paint from printing on the paper.

The first print was created with three separate print impressions on the same piece of paper with different colors. The first layer was made using golden ochre rolled onto the plate with a brayer, and then drawing random squiggly lines into the plate using a silicone paint pusher/shaper before printing. For the second layer green and purple acrylic paints were rolled onto the plate using a brayer. Then straight pieces of  cardboard were laid around the plate before printing to mask off certain areas. The final layer was a dark Payne's Gray, I think, using cardboard shapes again laid on the rolled plate to mask off certain areas from printing. In this final layer, the shapes were dropped with the printed side of the box down, so it offset words on the plate. I didn't plan this. We decided to print the off-set words to paper  on their own. The last layer of paint (the dark color) might have benefitted from a little less paint, a little medium and maybe little bit of another color like white so it wouldn't have been so "squishy". I might redo something like this to see. We didn't wait for the layers to dry, and that might affect the result as well. 

The print using the off-set words from the snack box is below. This is the “ghost" of what was left on the plate from the final pull of the first print. It's interesting how the words transferred and were randomly cut off. I'll remember to use that offset technique on purpose sometime.

For both of these prints, I might have done another layer of color, but my family liked them at this point. 

I'm learning about how much paint to put on the plate, and sometimes it depends on the type of paper you are printing on.