Notebooks/Sketchbooks/Art Journals with Gelli Arts® Gel Printed Covers by Birgit Koopsen

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

I hope you are all still enjoying summer to the fullest. But soon it will be time to go back to school. So here are some ideas for you to create colorful notebooks. Of course you can also use them as sketchbooks or art journals, depending on the paper you add inside.

Basically, you can use any gel printing technique to create covers for your notebooks, but in this video, I decided to use some handmade texture plates. It is very easy and inexpensive to create your own texture plates from a piece of cardboard and some sheets of self-adhesive craft foam, which you will find in the kids’ department at the craft or dollar store.

I kept it simple but fun-creating two texture plates from hand-cut shapes and two texture plates from die-cut shapes. To cover the staples, I printed some masking tape to apply over the spine of the books.

Have fun watching the video!

To create the texture plates, you can hand-cut or die-cut shapes from self-adhesive craft foam and apply them to a piece of cardboard. You can make them any size you like-I made mine a little bit bigger than half of my 8”x10” gel plate. This also makes them big enough to cover my entire 5”x7” plate.

When you use die cuts, you can often use both the negative and the positive parts to create a texture plate.

Roll out some paint and place two of the texture plates side by side on top of the wet paint, then rub well. If you just want the texture to show and not so many open areas, wait about a minute, then remove the texture plates. You’ll notice that not a lot of paint has been picked up by the foam-but maybe that’s exactly the look you want.

If you want the foam to pick up more paint and create clean, open areas, leave the texture plates on the gel plate until the paint is dry. How long that takes depends on the conditions in your room, like temperature, humidity, and the drying time of your paint. The longer you leave the texture plates on, the more paint will be picked up.

Don’t be afraid to leave the texture plates on too long—even if the paint is completely dry, you’ll still be able to lift the texture plates from the gel plate, even hours or days later.

After removing the texture plates, make sure all of the paint on the gel plate is completely dry before adding a pickup layer. Use as many colors as you like. Place a piece of smooth cardstock on top of the wet paint and rub well. I chose to cut my paper to size before printing (just a tiny bit smaller than my gel plate), but you can also do this after printing.

If not all of the paint is coming up, you might want to keep the paper on the plate a bit longer next time.

To create the tape for the spine, you can create texture on the plate using any technique you like. I used my mini Gelli Arts® texture tool to create striped tape. Wait for the paint on the plate to dry, then place the tape with the sticky side down on the plate, rub well, and lift it up. If there are any areas still sticky because they weren’t covered with paint well enough, you can apply a layer of matte medium on top to seal all of the sticky parts.

Fold the covers in the middle, place any folded paper you want inside, and use a long-arm stapler to staple the paper into the cover. If you don’t have a long-arm stapler, you could sew the pages in. I like to have the paper I place inside a little bit bigger than the cover so I can cut it to size later and be sure it fits the cover perfectly. After that, I glue the printed masking tape around the spine using a wet adhesive or gel medium.

Now all you have to do is add some labels if you wish and your notebooks, sketchbooks and/or art journals are ready! You can buy them as sticker sheets or find some online and print them yourself.