Recycling prints with Gelli

I still have a couple of EDiM sketches to post, but I thought we’d have something different today.

I am entering in this swap and I have to make 6 pages, 4″ x6″. I have to decorate the back as well as the front. Well, as you know I’m also a printmaker. A while ago I sorted out my failed prints, proofs and just prints I generally didn’t like, from the good prints, in the hope of finding a project for them. Well, I found one.

I got a bunch of prints and Gelli printed layers right over the top of them. The back of the print has become the clean paper I am going to sketch on. It’s BFK Rives paper, which is my favourite paper of all. There are some interesting embossing marks from the plate’s edge on some of them. Most but not all were solar plate etchings. I did the Gelli printing before cutting to size, and before any drawing. I did my best not to smear any paint on the clean paper and that worked fine.  I then cut to size. Jeepers they are small!

I made nine of them, (three in each picture) and that allows for less successful things to happen on the other side without it being a crisis. Most, though not all, of my prints were marine/industrial subjects. This is not what you’d normally choose to go with my chosen theme for the swap – tropical plants, but I think it makes it more edgy, and that’s what we’re aiming for, right?

It’s a bank holiday Monday today and still mostly dark at 8.30 am. It’s bucketing with rain again and I expect it will be as cold. Yesterday I completed two of these pages. I was going to make them totally unrealistic, but somehow I wasn’t in the mood and it seemed that actual tropical plants are as weird and strange as anything I could make up.

Not sure if I will do more today as I might start to make the sketchbooks. I also have to prepare for the demo I’m doing at The Art Scene on Thursday.

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