Getting my art on!!!

Today I was able to have a go with the Gelli Plate I bought last week at Art from the Heart.

I have had some small bottles of Golden Paint for quite a long time (10+ years) and got them out to play with.  They were not really the colours that I use any more so I got out all my Ranger Dabbers as well.

I had ordered a large Dina Wakely stencil from A Sprinkle of Imagination and conveniently that arrived this morning.  So I unwrapped that and found all the large stencils that I have.  Not as many as the small ones!!!

I took some paper out of a sketchbook and decided to limit myself to 10 initial prints using red and yellow acrylic paint.

No. 1 print and the shadow print  using large bubble wrap

Nos. 3 & 4 using a stencil

No. 5 which was actually the stencil I had used above pressed onto the paper

Nos. 6 & 7 using the Dina Wakley Mosaic stencil

No. 8 just pressing onto the stencil and no. 9 using the brayer directly onto the paper

No. 10 - just bits of paint that remained on the stencil

I was going to take a photo as I did each print on top - but I didn't so here are the same sheets of paper after several more layers of monoprinting.

Nos. 1 & 2

Nos. 3 & 4


No. 5

Nos. 6 & 7

Nos. 8 & 9


No. 10

And here are two extra pages that were part of the mop up of the Gelli Plate at various points.

And lastly the very last print that I did to remove all the paint left on the Gelli Plate and probably the best print I did.

 

Some of the pages are more pleasing than others and I've realised that I forgot to look at the level of transparency of the paint so some of the prints didn't work quite as well as others.


Thanks for popping by
Bernice

Art Journaling Dina style

Following on from the Gelli plate day, I spent a further two days at Art from the Heart learning about Art Journaling Dina style.  Dina Wakley that is!

And what a fabulous time it was.

We worked on a variety of lessons and this one was about raised texture.  There's chipboard and hessian and a doily on there.  As well as gesso and paint.  And stencilling! 

We spent the two days getting thoroughly inky and painty and creating lovely things.  Well, mostly.  I do like most of what I produced but I'm not keen on the one where we painted all over it!  With Payne's Grey.  Which was actually blue!

Anyway, I digress.  After making our pages on A3 paper, we folded them in half and made a book.  One page was cut in half to make the covers.  Here's the front cover.

And here's the back.

This exercise involved following instructions from Dina.  As in add 7 circles.  Add a focal point.  Etc. Etc.  We were all given the same instructions and it was fascinating to see how different everyone's finished page was.

This page was about using a silhouette.

This is probably my favourite page.

This is the one I said about earlier. It actually looks darker in real life!

I love all the white space on this one.

And here's the last page in my book.

Which I actually worked on this way up.

It was a fabulous two days.  And I bought Dina's new book and she signed it for me.  Woohoo.

Can't wait for the next time she is in the UK.

Gelli Plate: Dina style

On Monday this week I spent the day at Art from the Heart with some lovely ladies and the amazing Dina Wakley.

We spent our time producing a variety of monoprints using a Gelli plate and stencils. 

One of the lovely ladies had brought this gorgeous Crafter's Workshop stencil with her and I was able to have a go with it.  As you might imagine the stencil is on my wish list.

And here is the one I like best.

Dina provided us with lots of different papers to print on and lots of encouragement and tuition.

I tried to use different colours and stencils.

We made our own stamps from fun foam.

We used deli paper.  I scrunched up the deli paper in the left hand one to see if that made any difference to the result.

I ended up with 30 different prints from which we had to choose 4 to make into an A6 size book.  We were given some tags as well.  After dinner, Maggie and I sat in her hotel room and stamped and stencilled on our finished book.

One of the reason I took the class was because I wasn't convinced about the need for a Gelli plate.  After all I knew how to do monoprinting using a glass plate.

Guess what!  I came home with a Gelli plate.  I'm looking forward to having an extended play with it.  But first I need to stock up on stencils. 

Thanks to Dina and Maggie for a lovely day.