Gelli Arts® Printing Fun With Texture Blocks

Hello and welcome to the
Gelli Arts® blog!

Today I want to show you
how easy and fun it is to create your own texture blocks.

A while ago someone
showed me a small block that had some stamps and (fabric) textures on each side.
She found it at a fair and used it in her mixed media projects.

Of course my mind started
spinning when I saw that.

I thought it would be
pretty easy to create something like that myself and if I made it a little
bigger it would be a perfect tool for Gelli® Printing!

So I went to the DIY
store, picked a long beam (1 ¾” x 2 ¾” thick ( 6,8×4,4cm)) and had it cut into pieces sized at 4” (10cm) each.

Then I looked around in
my studio and gathered a lot of stuff that would create great designs on the Gelli® plate.

I used heavy body gel
medium (Matte Gel from Liquitex) to apply small objects to the blocks.  For objects
covering the whole side of a block, I used strong double-sided adhesive tape (Crafty Power Tape from Scrapbook Adhesives by 3L). Then I randomly added all kinds of textures to the
blocks.

It didn’t take long to cover 4 blocks. Four blocks… that’s 24 different textures! How cool is that?! With one block you have 6 textures in your hand! The print below was made with one texture block:

I feel so organized
using these blocks. Instead of having big piles of printing
material lying around my Gelli® plate, covering the whole table, I now have these
blocks, which are also easy to store. And they look great too, especially once
they get covered in layers of colorful paint!

Here are some examples
of prints with the textures I used:

In total I have created 8 blocks now, that is 64 textures! Besides the examples I showed here you could use bubble wrap, dry wall tape, punchinella, cardboard (remove the top layer for a fun striped pattern, cut in shapes), paper clips, buttons, washers, wrinkled tin foil, fabric, elastic bands, plastic bottle caps, dried grasses (cover them with a thin layer of gel medium to make them last longer), lace…. If you don’t have a die cutting machine you can go to a dollar store or toy store and get really cheap pre-cut foam shapes and letters that are perfect to use. The possibilities are endless!

Here are some more prints made with the blocks created in this video:

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and that you got inspired to create your own fabulous texture blocks.

Thank you for stopping by and I would love to hear what you would use. Please share your ideas with us, we would love to see pictures too! And make sure to check out our giveaway below which includes some fabulous texture blocks!

Birgit Koopsen

GIVEAWAY IS CLOSED

To enter the giveaway, click on the red “ENTER GIVEAWAY HERE” button below! (This will ensure that we can contact the winner and that entries are limited to one per person. One winner will be selected from all the entries via a random number generator to receive this very special giveaway!) Entries will be accepted until July 25th at noon EST. Our lucky winner will be contacted by email and announced here on the blog and on our Facebook page by 5:00PM EST the following day.

PS: Please—share your prints with us on our Facebook page, or on Instagram using the hashtag #gelliprint #gelliarts and #gelliplate. Tag us with @gelliarts on Instagram and Twitter too! We love to see what you’re creating!!

Remember, we now have Gelli® partners all over the world, so it’s easier than ever to find a Gelli® retailer near you!