More gelatin printing!!

In my last post I wanted to show some pictures of the process of gelatin printing. But before I do that let me show the gelatin plate itself. I made up a batch of gelatin using 12 packages of unflavored gelatin in a 9 x 13 glass baking pan with instructions from printmaking without a press blog which was very informative. Go check her out - she has lots of excellent tips on gelatin printing. The biggest plus in making your own is that you can make it as big as you like. Also if I were to do this again I would use a dedicated shallow jelly roll pan and just leave the gelatin in it. I'm sure one has to make lots of batches until one gets it just right.

After it has set up on the counter, you take a knife or something similar and go around the edges to loosen and then very very carefully flip it out onto some plastic support. I used a white kitchen garbage bag wrapped around some thick cardboard. Then place it the refrigerator and let it set up until it's really firm. I did mine overnight. Notice how it hogs up a lot of space. Make sure to let family members know that this is not something to eat.

So on to the printing. The next picture shows how to brayer the paint onto the gelatin. You can also brayer it off to one side and then roll it on too. It's probably a good idea to use a softer brayer like the Speedball tan one instead of this black one but that's all I had to use.

Next I added a mask cut on my die cutting machine in the shape of a dress form. I laid it down over the paint on the plate to block out the color. I placed the paper on top, smoothed it out with my hands and pulled it off the plate. The dress form mask left a white impression on the colored paper.

Please excuse my bad picture taking skills. The picture on the left was taken the next day in a different location. If you look closely you can see a hint a plant sprig that was left behind from a previous print. Not sure how that happened but I like it.

 After that first print was dry I went ahead and inked up another color - I think it was a ultramarine blue with a texture plate (Laura Murray?) pressed gently into the paint on the gelatin plate and then pulled off. After that dried I added some Golden yellow ocher and burnt sienna acrylic glaze.

Here are a few more examples of printing with masks.

 Some nice plant sprigs

 Some funky circles

This one is just plain odd looking but you gotta try different color combinations to see what happens. That's what is so fun about doing this. Note: I used a mask that had paint dried on it and it pulled up some of the gelatin with it. Hopefully this won't be a problem when I go to use the Gelli printing plate. I just wish my Gelli printing plate order would come in sooner! More later!