Another Favorite Background Technique: Masking + Gelliprinting

Greetings, Lost Coasters! Today I wanted to talk a bit about a cool background technique you can use with any stamped image and a little masking. Fire up your trusty gel plate and let's get going!

I made this piece using the Butterfly Face and Diamonds Borders stamps. I inked them with three colors of Stazon in purple, navy, and turquoise, stamped the images, and cut masks for them. 

Using repositionable adhesive, I tacked the masks down over the stamped images, then got to work with my gelli plate. For this piece, I used the 5" x 7" plate. (I cropped the final piece a bit so that I got a composition I liked.)

Onto the gel plate I rolled on three colors of acrylic paint (blue, purple, lavender) with a brayer. I dragged a pencil eraser (the kind that fits on the end of your pencil) through the paint to make the wavy lines, and pressed a texture plate into the wet paint to get the warped pattern most visible in the purples. (NOTE: Don't worry about being too perfect and precise with this--you want a loose cool arty effect!) Then I printed directly onto the masked images.

There was still a little paint on the plate and not enough textural interest going on in the blue area of the print for my taste, so I put a numbers mask down at the top, rolled just a bit of black paint onto the plate for a dryish, texture-y effect, and printed that on top of the still-masked Butterfly Face. I wanted to keep these numbers in the background as a quiet bit of additional interest, not steal focus from the beautimous Butterfly. 😜

Then--just remove the masks, and voila! You have a quirky, arty piece ready to go in no time at all!

If you try this technique, please be sure to let me know, because I would LOVE to see your projects. 😍 Happy stamping and gelli-printing!