Homemade Gel Plate Printing!
I was scrolling through an image search for art journal inspiration, and I kept seeing awesome examples of a technique I'd never heard of: gel plate printing.
It apparently became popular a couple of years ago. I've always been interested in printmaking, but all the methods of doing so (besides block cutting, which I don't enjoy) were either expensive or required a ton of materials and workspace, or both.
Gel plate printing, at its most basic, involves spreading acrylic or printmaking paint in a thin layer over a gel plate, using any of a number of method to create a design in it, and then placing a sheet of paper over the plate and pressing down with your hands. When the paper is lifted, the paint design comes with it.
It's a version of monoprinting, as the exact image can't be made more than one time.
Various gel plates are sold, but there are also recipes to make a DIY plate out of gelatin and a few other ingredients. Here's one recipe.
I didn't mind making a temporary gelatin plate just to experiment and see if I liked the process. So I used a recipe that was basically plain gelatin and water.
The resulting plate was unappetizing looking in the fridge, where it solidified — but I was excited that the recipe worked! It's always so nice to Successfully Make a Thing.
One of the methods for creating the image on the paint-covered gel plate is magazine transfer. Basically, I spread cheap black craft paint onto the plate as thin as I could with a regular rectangular brush (not recommended), and then laid a magazine clipping down in the paint.
The theory is that the lighter parts of the image will soak up the paint, and the toner in the black parts of the picture will repel the paint. Therefore when you (carefully) peel up the image, paint will be left where the black parts of the image were.
This creates a “stamp” you can then press paper onto.
In reality, magazine transfers with a gel plate are screamingly difficult. I get one out of every ten or so tries to work. It depends heavily on the magazine you use, what types of ink it prints with, the age of the magazine itself, and sheer chaotic luck.
But I kinda like that.
Things that force me to test my ability to analyze and keep track of a ton of technical factors, while ultimately mocking me for trying, and creating wild-card images at random: I will definitely be doing more of this!