If like me you’d not heard of this before, it’s a fun way of printing using a brayer roller and a flexible (gelli) plate to create prints with layers of colour and texture. You can buy gelli plates online, and while they’re not cheap (an A4 size plate is currently about £30) it should last many years. And if you’re wondering why gelli, then it refers to the gelatine used to create the printing plates.
I’ve only recently discovered this fun craft after being intrigued by a local Adult Learning class, which I’ve since signed up for. My course has four two hour sessions and cost me £18 - I wasn’t sure what to expect, but reasoned that I had nothing to lose. Attending one two hour session for that price is good value, four sessions is exceptional. As it turned out, it’s good fun and I’m definitely heading back next week to find out - and create - more.
It’s been a while since I’ve taken a ‘printing’ workshop and this one looks to have more immediate results than lino printing, which I’ve tried before and have done a couple of times since learning.
Equipment for Gelli Printing
Apart from the gelli plate and brayer - I don’t have my own yet, and these are provided in the class I’m taking - the other things you’ll need to get started are paper (and lots of it), acrylic paints and some wet wipes. You might also want to wear an apron as removing acrylic paints from clothes can be tricky, not something I’ve tried yet, and hopefully I won’t need to either!
I had five basic colours - white, black, yellow, pink and blue - and this was enough to get started, though after a few prints I knew that I was keen to add more variety to my paint range. After the class I stopped off at The Works and picked up a set of 20 colourful paints to add to my newly growing paint stash. I’ll be looking out for the perfect tin to store them in soon too no doubt! I also picked up another pad of paper - the £2 bumper pad for kids’ drawing sort, as I think that will also be handy.
My first print
Like everyone else in the class I was keen to get on and do some printing. The advice was to start with our lightest colour, so for me that was yellow as white paint on white paper was unlikely to be that exciting! I wish I’d got a picture of the gelli plate, but it is weird - quite tactile, definitely flexible and well, squidgy in a solid sort of way.
After dabbing on a couple of pea sized blobs of paint it was time to use the brayer (or roller) to spread this across the surface. Here a light touch is everything, and you have to work quickly - especially in a warm room. Then your paper goes on top of the paint, and using your hands you smooth the paper over the gelli plate. This transfers the paint to the paper, and voila once the paper is lifted you have your print.
This is mine:
After an hour or so of chat, this was quite exciting - though I take your point, that it’s not really that exciting. But the point of this was to practice how much paint to use, and for that it was effective as my next print was barely there yellow, which I quickly printed over with pink.
As you can see there’s some texture and some missing parts, but that’s ok and is part of the beauty of this kind of printing. It isn’t perfect, and you’re never really sure how it’ll turn out. If that’s an issue for you, then gelli plate printing might not be for you!
Using two colours
This is where I felt restricted by my paint colours, and why I added to my repertoire so quickly. There’s many combinations you can do with the basic colours, but with more colours the combinations is almost endless, though the challenge will be to work out the balance on what looks good, and what’s too much, and to avoid over rolling and ending up with ‘sludge’ no matter what colours you start with.
The gelli plate is still the same size, so with two (or more) colours you need to reduce the size of the paint blobs you add to the plate so it’s not awash with paint. I tried with yellow and pink, then some blue and finally some black - with mixed results.
Because of how the gelli printing works you don’t need to clean your gelli plate in between prints, but it’s definitely worthwhile rollering off the excess paints in between applications. That’s not onerous at all as you can use a single sheet of paper for that, and it can result in some textured and very usable prints too.
Cleaning up afterwards
No special equipment is needed for this either - soap and water to wash the brayer roller, and we used a wet wipe to remove any paint residue that remained on the gelli plate. That’s my sort of cleaning up!
Using my gelli print artwork
Clearly these gelli prints aren’t masterpieces! But even these will have plenty of uses for my other crafts, the obvious ones are card making and collaging. I can see that once I’ve learnt more about adding texture these will be even more useful, and it’s likely that a single gelli printing session will generate prints for a good while, as well as providing the opportunity for a mindful afternoon.
I’m interested to learn more about this craft, and how texture can be added with items such as bubble wrap, packing tape (I have a fair bit of that leftover from our house move!) and especially leaves and more, I’m sure I’ll have one or two items in my craft room to try out too. I’ve another three weeks remaining in the class, so I’ll share more as I learn new skills.
But it’s definitely a promising start introducing me to a brand new craft, and I can’t wait to see where this takes me.