Gelli Arts® Birch Tree Prints by Tania Ahmed

Today, I am thrilled and honored to be on
the Gelli Arts® Blog as part of the Artist Team! I am sharing a project on
how you can create birch tree inspired art. I had seen some artists create
fantasy birch tree art and I decided to recreate these, but with Gelli Arts®
Printing Plates! I had so much fun creating these prints and I love that they
make a beautifully finished project that I can use to give away as gifts or
decorate with at home.

There are two ways you can create your backgrounds: you can either apply your tape to your Gelli® Printing Plate or to your card stock. The video tutorial shows both ways. For all products used for this project, please see the materials list at the end of the post.

Step 1:

Mask off your “tree trunk” and branches
with washi tape or low tack tape. You can angle them or even overlap them to
make your scene look interesting.

Step 2:

Apply Cosmic Blue and Deep Jungle Gelli
Arts® Premium Acrylic Paint with your roller. You can use any color in your
background, I used blues and greens to give the effect of a sky and a green
forest.

Step 3:

Place your stencil on top of your painted
Gelli® Printing Plate. I find that stencils with open spaces work best.

Step 4:

Lift some of the paint through the stencil
with Gelli Arts® Parchment Paper. You can also use this paper to clean your
roller in between prints. I like using these clean off papers in collages.

Step 5:

Before taking a print, make sure to remove
your tape from the Gelli® Printing Plate.

Step 6:

Pull your print and you will see that you
are left with white space where your tree trunks and branches will appear!

Step 7:

Practice creating the swipes with the straight
edge from one of the Gelli Arts® Mini Printing Tools. Swipe Gelli Arts® Jet
Black Premium Acrylic Paint lightly and at an angle to partially paint the tree
trunks and branches. If you think that you are getting too much paint on your
project, dab off some of the paint from the tool.