Gelli Arts® Gel Printing with Artificial Flowers by Birgit Koopsen

Hi everyone and welcome to the Gelli Arts® blog, it’s Birgit here!

In this blog post, I want to show you how you can easily create stunning prints using flowers.

You can use both artificial and/or real flowers. They each have their pros and cons.

The pro of artificial flowers is of course that they can be used over and over again.

Even with paint piling up on the fabric, they go a long way. The downside of using fabric flowers is that when you look closely at the prints you will see the fabric texture in the paint.

You notice it especially when you put a real flower print next to an artificial flower print.

This brings us straight to the pro of real flowers, no artificial texture in the prints!

The downside of printing with real flowers might be that you don’t want to “waste” good flowers.

Although I don’t consider it a waste to use beautiful flowers for art—especially when the artwork lasts much longer than the blooms themselves—I usually wait for my bouquets to fade. When it comes to mixed arrangements, chrysanthemums tend to outlast the rest. And how convenient-they also happen to be some of the best flowers to print with!

Another con is that petals might fall off while stamping and you carefully have to remove them from the plate.

I also like to use tulips right before I have to toss them out. Just before the petals fall off.

In this video, I share a couple of options for using flowers on the gel plate using acrylic paint and PanPastels.

Enjoy watching!

Watch the YouTube tutorial here: https://youtu.be/_mHkU4PSJbI

There is a difference between flowers that you can stamp with and flowers you can’t stamp with.

With relatively flat, open flowers, you can press them into wet paint to lift some off the plate. This leaves behind a clear flower shape that you can then go back and color in.

To color the flowers you can use acrylic paint, but you can also use PanPastel.

Use a brush to add acrylic paint and a sponge or a soft tool to apply the PanPastel.

Always wait for the first layer of paint to dry before adding another layer.

If you want to create a nice even border around your print, you can use the mini placement tool.

When you use heavy, sturdy paper, it is best to turn everything over and remove the plate from the paper. This way your paper will lie flat and you won’t damage it.

When printing with flowers that can not be used to stamp with the top down you can use a different technique. When printing with tulips for instance, you can lay the flowers flat on the plate, then cover with a sheet of light paper (copier paper/parchment paper) and press this down to remove paint from around the flowers. Then, you carefully remove the flowers and use the leftover paint that is underneath for the final print.

You already have to determine which color you want the flower heads to have in the print. When the paint on the plate is dry, you can either add the pickup layer and pull the print, or use PanPastel to color the image before pulling the print.