Journal52 2015 Week 12: Inspiration Board #Journal52 #ArtJournal #GelliPlate

I'm not sure what the problem is, but I'm having trouble getting inspired by the Journal52 prompts.  Possibly, it's because I'm taking watercolor classes, and my focus is on watercolor.  I do that--get mono-mania-minded on one thing to the point where everything becomes difficult.

So with the prompt 'Inspiration Board', I was feeling no inspiration.  However, I had a couple of backgrounds in my journal, that I'd created with a Gelli Arts monoprinting plate, and one of my fallbacks is to simply use words, so I pulled out my Sakura gellyrolls and used a variety of words and doodles to 'inspire' it up.

I've written a bit about my process below.


If you are unfamiliar with the Gelli Arts gel printing plate, it's block of a thickened jello-like substance--more solid than jello, but it looks and feels like it.  You can put almost any non-alcohol medium on this plate, make patterns in the medium, and then press paper to it, and you get a print on your paper.  This leads to all sorts of fun.

You can make temporary versions of these plates using actual jello with glycerin and a few other things.  Just google 'DIY monoprinting plate' or something similar and you'll find lots of tutorials.  If you like printing with it, then I recommend buying one of the permanent plates.


So I smeared areas of Primary Red, Primary Blue, and Primary Yellow acrylic paint on my plate.  This was a mistake, and I should have known better.  If you mix the three primary colors together you get mud.  You can mix two of them together and get beautiful hues, but add in that third and yuck.

I had visions of carefully mixing two colors on one side of the plate and the other two on the far side.  But-ha ha--me and carefully?

It didn't go too bad.  I did get a couple areas of yuck, especially with the yellow.

I made patterns in the paint by running a comb through it, from side to side.  Then I ran the comb between the line in some areas.

I had disks I made from Amazing Casting Resin, and I pressed those into the paint to get little designs.


This was my finished background.  As I said--there was some yuck colors, and it came out a bit dark.  The dark isn't necessarily bad, but it does require more planning to work on.


The yuck was the worst in the upper left, so I put some rubbing alcohol on a paper towel and scrubbed a bit. This has the result of making the yuck color even yuckier, but it also makes it lighter, and therefore a little easier to work on.


The rest was just writing and drawing.  I used my J. Herbin Brush Pen (I'm giving away 4 of these this week-go here to enter.  Giveaway ends 4/12 at 11:59 PDT) and Sakura's Gellyroll pens, namely metallic gold and silver and Moonlight florescent yellow.


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