Hi there! It’s Marsha here today with lots of rainbow inspiration!
Are you playing along with the Gelli Arts® March Mania Printing Challenge over on Instagram?
If you are, you know that the prompt for day 3 is RAINBOWS!
I love all rainbow colours (plus a few more!); however, it can be tricky to simultaneously use all of them on the gel plate. The colours can lose their vibrance if you mix them too much, and if you’re a bright colour lover like me, that may not be quite the look you’re going for.
So I’ve come up with a couple of fun ways to add multiple colours to your prints at the same time. I hope they will spark ideas for you to try during the March Mania challenge!
Rainbow Order
In the video, I initially used a 6″ brayer that covers the entire width of my 5″ gel printing plate. If you do not have a brayer that large, only apply paint dots as wide as your brayer will cover to still get the striped effect.
Rainbow ‘Confetti’
The key to this technique is not to mix the paint too much. More dots mean more coverage in one roll; however, more dots also mean more paint, which can become harder to control. Experiment with this technique to see how many dots of paint you need to produce a satisfactory result.
Rainbow Layering
I’m a massive fan of layering, so I couldn’t leave out what happens if you layer all colours of the rainbow on top of each other. As you can see, the colours do lose some of the vibrancy; however, if you use opaque paints, the coverage should be excellent. Please note that not all of the colours I chose were opaque. There were some half-transparent ones too.
It’s always a good idea to let each print layer dry completely before adding another!
I’m using the new Gelli Arts® Mini Placement Tool to align my layered prints. The Mini Tool works with any size plate and creates a 1″ border around your prints.
Happy March Mania gel printing! Don’t forget to add #GelliArts and #MarchPrintingChallenge to your challenge entries so we can admire them too!
Marsha.
Materials:
- Gelli Arts® 5″ x 7″ printing plate
- Gelli Arts® Mini Placement Tool
- Gelli Arts® Parchment Paper
- Brayer 4″– 6″
- Paper cut to 7″ x 9″ (I like drawing paper/Bristol)
- Acrylic paints (Liquitex Basics Pyrrole Red, Cadmium Orange Hue, Cadmium Yellow Light Hue, Brilliant Yellow Green, Light Blue Permanent, Light Blue Violet, Brilliant Purple, Medium Magenta, Winsor & Newton Galeria Titanium White, Mixing White, Mars Black)
- Matte Gel Medium
- Scrap paper
- Optional: Temporary adhesive (E-Z Runner Repositionable Adhesive Dots by Scrapbook Adhesives)
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When will we be able to buy the placement tools in the UK?
Wonderful work!!
Fabulous work and inspiration, as always, Marsha – thanks!