Gelli Plate

Brayered backgrounds with Distress Oxide Inks

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Angela Porter Brayered Backgrounds 17Feb2018

The image shows some of the backgrounds I’ve made using a Speedball Brayer, a Gelli Arts Gelli Plate, white card and Tim Holtz’s Distress Oxide Inks.

I’ve been taking a little break from the work for the A Dangle a Day book, a change freshens up the creative part of my mind.

The process is quite simple.

  1. Press the oxide ink down onto the Gelli plate.
  2. Use the brayer to spread the ink over the Gelli plate. The Gelli plate acts as a blending mat.
  3. Use the brayer to add ink to the white card.  I find it helpful to have just printer paper under the card and to move the brayer from the paper onto the card.
  4. Build up layers of inks until you’re happy with the look.  Using one colour of ink you can quite easily build up an ombre background.
  5. Spray or dot water onto the paper and let the inks ‘oxidise’ if you wish.

I clean the brayer off on the copy paper between inks.  I also use the copy paper to lift off any residual ink from the Gelli plate between different ink colours.  Sometimes, I dab the Gelli plate with a baby wipe and then use copy paper to clean the plate, especially if the residual ink and the new ink will make a nasty brown sludgy colour.  In this instance, I wipe the brayer with a baby wipe and then clean and dry it on copy paper too.

Sometimes, the copy paper becomes a beautiful background paper too, so I store those away for future use, sometimes.

I’m going to scan some of these backgrounds in to use as backgrounds to my digital art, but then I’m going to draw on them.  I’m using quite a few in my Sketchbook Project sketchbook for 2018.

Be Authentic – Mixed Media

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BeAuthentic_30April2017_AngelaPorter

I’ve mostly finished this piece of mixed media art.  I think I need to add some pearls or similar, maybe some shadows around the flowers and foliage, but it is, in essence, complete.

I’m quite pleased with it, especially as I kept to a mainly monochrome colour scheme of blues and greens, but pinks and purples had to make a little bit of an appearance just to add some accents.

It’s another big one – A3 in size.  Lots of Foamiran flowers have been used; I used Distress crayons and a baby wipe to add colour to the white foamiran before heating and shaping each layer.  The colours are the same as some used in the background.

My focal point is an ACEO or ATC that I made a few weeks ago at the start of my mixed media explorations.

In places you can pick out the subtle sparkle on the background and foliage – achieved by spraying with a mist of gold perfect pearls.

Many of the coloured papers I used in the collage were created using a Gelli Plate and PaperArtsy fresco paints.

A fair amount of metallic and iridescent paints from Pebeo, Liquitex and Daler-Rowney have been used too.