Fun with gelatin printing

Yesterday I got to mess around with gelatin printing and had a blast. A gelatin printing plate is no more than a batch of unflavored gelatin made in a baking pan and flopped out onto a piece of plastic (preferably something waterproof and transportable). What was not so fun, however, is how messy it can be if you're not super careful and in my case I managed to get it on my kitchen counter which if you don't catch it in time will harden to a stiff sticky goo. The other problem was that it did not set up as well as I had thought so it started cracking after about an hour or so of printing. Here in Arizona it gets pretty hot and we keep our thermostats up around 80 degrees or so and I think it may affect the firmness if left out too long.

You know, life is too short so I'm getting a Gelli printing plate here so that I don't have these hassles anymore and I can get to the fun part right away!!

On to the good stuff. I tried all kinds of paints and stencils and anything I could get my hands on to make marks carefully onto the gelatin plate. I especially loved the unexpected results and the interaction of colors between layers superimposed on one another. It's so nice to have less control over the process of art making and to let the wonderful experiments happen. I wish I had taken pictures of what this process looks like. Maybe next time. In the meantime here are just a few I will share with you out of the 24 prints I made. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you that you can make a lot of multi-layered prints in just a few hours which makes it very addicting.

This was done in 3 layers: yellow green with red splotches followed by blue metallic paint then a dark reddish purple. The stencil (Crafters Workshop) was laid down on the final layer and the paper laid down over that and printed. Here are a few more: