Gelli Joy

Yesterday, I got together with Kelly and Barb at Bizzy B for our monthly play date (unfortunately, Laura was sick and unable to join us).  Barb had mentioned she was going to try out her new gelli plates and I was curious, because I had heard different people in the art journaling world mention them in recent months but I had no idea what they were.

Julie Balzer describes this monoprinting process very well here.  Basically, you spread paint on a flat pad of silicone gel that comes in different sizes (I have the medium size, which is about 8 x 10 inches), place a piece of paper over top of the paint, roll over the back of the paper with a brayer to be sure the entire surface gets covered, peel off the paper and voila. You can do with or without stencils to add a pattern.

Here's a picture of Barb as she is preparing the gelli pad:

and holding up a finished page:

Here is Kelly creating a page

and one of her finished creations:

See that candy dispenser in the background of the photo above? It was filled with a very special batch of M&M's.

We had so much fun doing this yesterday. We started about 1 p.m. and kept going until close to 10 p.m.!!  We ran out of our first batch of cardstock paper around 4:30 p.m., had to send Kelly out for more.  She came back with 3 9 x 12 inch journals filled with mixed media watercolour paper, one for each of us, and we got busy filling them (after a quick dinner break, panini sandwiches from Tim Horton's - yum).  In the end, I made 59 pages, filling up exactly half the book.  We knew it was getting late and kept saying we really should stop...but we just COULDN'T, we were having too much fun making art!

Here are a few of the pages I made:

Now we just have to decide what to do with our creations. Background pages in the art journal? Cut them up to use on other pages?  Make them into greeting cards?  The possibilities are endless!