More Gelli Print "Pictures"

Thought I'd share a few more monoprints I made the other day which I turned into finished images.

This first two became images just from the printing alone.  I didn't do any additional coloring or inkwork after pulling the paint.

I started with an old piece of scrap paper from a monoprint I made nearly two years ago.  I didn't like the original effort, which was just a sheet of that pinkish background you see above.  But, never throw failed monoprints away!  You never know what you'll see in them when you come back to them later. 

This one looked like sky to me.  And even though I don't live anywhere near mountains, I thought it might be fun to paint a summery sunset scene.  Probably because it is winter and perma-gray where I live right now... but I digress.

So, I put some dark purple-red paint down, hand cut a stencil from cardstock, and pulled the dark mountain shape.  Then I wanted to add a foreground in green, so I rolled a blue and yellow and white mix onto the plate, textured it by tapping my brayer into the paint, and used the same stencil, offset, to get the green layer.

Then, I wanted some clouds, so I watered down some white paint, painted loops in it with my brayer's end, and printed that to the top.

I like it just the way it is!  Yay!

The next piece started the same way, from a monoprint I made two years ago that I didn't like, but which I kept because, hey, you use that stuff some day.

I decided it was all the same basic value and it needed some dark tones.  So I cut out some random squiggly-shaped masks and laid it on some black/blue paint I had rolled onto the gelli plate.  Pressed the paper down over the masks and voila!  

Not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I really like it, so I'm not going to mess with it any more.

Finally for this post, I'm going to show you a piece that required a little bit of ink work after the printing.

I started scrap the was just a dark dark mess, so I put down a little green and a little yellow in kind of a random pattern on the paper, and printed it.  Then, pretty quickly, this picture emerged:

I am lucky to live in the woods, and we have at least two resident Great Horned Owls on the property.  I hear and see them fairly regularly, and I think about them a lot.  So I was glad when one popped out of the paint for me.  All I had to do to finish this piece was trace the shapes I saw and add a few more colors.  My Posca paint pens work well for this!

Terrific fun with the surprise and creative treasure hunt that is (for me, anyhow) monoprinting.