Collect Beautiful Gelli Prints!

Hello all!  I hope you're all doing okay.  Here's some distraction for you today - it's time for a new challenge theme over at A Vintage Journey, and for the next month the lovely Julia wants you to have a play with your Gelli plates because It's Gelli Time!




As always there's lots of fabulous inspiration from the Creative Guides to start you off, so do make sure to check it all out.

I've got a very photo heavy post for you (yes, another one after the Creative Skypeing extravaganza, sorry!) but this is what happens when you start playing with the Gelli plate... you never get just one print.  I ended up with eight tags (and a few spares that I didn't like so much)... printed front and back!

So what was I to do with them all?  Well, I bound them into a book so join me as I turn the pages for you.

I'm afraid I don't have much on the process... there often isn't time when you're drawing prints to keep stopping to take photos.  Besides, I got into the swing of things and was really just working intuitively, printing and reprinting to build the layers until I was happy.











I do have a couple of photos from before it was all assembled - here are the tags, one side of the sets at least.  I did some inky prints over the paint on some of them, so that you get translucent layers too.











As you may have spotted in the top left of that group photo, I started out with some real leaves in the printing process.

Using natural elements is my favourite thing to do with the Gelli plate, and the multiple print thing happened to me last time I had some Gelli playtime too, when I ended up with my Meadow Medley album.












I like that in places you can see them hovering in the layers...

I like to work with quite watery washes of paint on the Gelli plate for some layers, or with ink and water to create soft artsy effects.











For the most part the stencil became my major tool for adding detail.  The leaves kept curling round the brayer which was really annoying!















Once I decided I was going to make a book, I did some stamping with the Field Notes stamp set onto some watery inked card to create lots of ephemera to use in collages on each page.











I like that there are lots of the same labels and fragments, repeated in various formations.  It gives the album a harmonious feel to have those elements echoing from page to page.













For the cover, I used some of those same ephemera in a simple collage with some of the paint-covered leaves and the other element which became part of the harmony - some flowers stamped and embossed for extra delight.








So, I'm mostly going to shut up now and let you see the finished mini-album with maybe a few words about the stories emerging in the collages...  I hope you enjoy seeing it as much as I enjoyed creating it.

Remember, all the tiny photos will become big ones if you click on them for a close-up.







Let's start with the completed cover...

The book is bound very simply with rustic twine.








As well as the real leaves (sealed with matte medium), I added some glass droplets of "dew" and tangled thread to give movement and randomness.

There's a butterfly from the Field Notes ephemera packs, and a quote chip, all layered over the tiny flower tendrils stamped in Pumice Stone and clear-embossed.

Given the topic is Gelli prints, I didn't want to cover the pages too much...
















... so the collaging inside is very minimal.








As well as my hand-stamped ephemera, there are some Photobooth photos, embossed stamping of nature images...

... and some of my new PaperArtsy quotes mainly from EAB16 Magic & Wonder.  There's a real joy and positivity to the words in this set... I feel they're much-needed right now.







On the next page spread, the tiny flowers are embossed in bright white...
















... and you have Celia's joyous exclamation from As You Like It by William Shakespeare.








I added embossing ink around the edges in places, and these words just had to go with the lovely silhouette print of the leaves.

It's almost a one-layer print, but I added the tiny touch of inked stencil printing very late on.  Happy tags!







The next pages are full of insects - the one from the ephemera pack leaps to the eye...















... and then there are some multiple Entomology stampings done in Pumice Stone and clear-embossed for sunlit shimmer.








The quote here is an odd-one-out.  Rather than Magic & Wonder, it's from EAB02 Darkness & Light, but it felt like it belonged with these happy women.

The circle stamping is done with a Distress Paint lid, and of course there's always white spatter to add extra life.







A fragment of story on the next pages - the young girl full of Celia-like enthusiasm for the wonders of the world...














... and the older woman looking back and knowing that it is from that joy and curiosity in the things around you that wisdom grows as you get older.








We're back to the Pumice Stone flowers here, and lots of inky stencil layers on the prints - a couple of my favourites...

The balancing act of the collages at the far edges, with the book page butterfly turning into a beautiful blue one on the facing page, makes this one of my favourite spreads in the book.







For the next pages, I shifted the collage positions to the inner edges of the tag book, towards the "spine" (can't really be a spine with only one point of attachment, can it?!).














And we're back to some more insects, ephemeral and embossed, this time against some slightly deeper colour tones on the gelli prints themselves.







Since she has a whole letter to read there, I decided she didn't need any extra words.  I think from the smile on her face that it's from someone rather special to her.

You can feel her excitement about the letter buzzing off the page, like the energetic bees surrounding her - or is that just me?!







This one is probably my favourite spread of the whole book - though it's a close-run thing, to be honest.















I love the lighter than air prints and the glint of the skeleton leaves (Pumice stone, clear-embossing again).









The dragonfly perched on his grassy stem was a late addition, but he really makes it come alive for me.  And the W.B. Yeats quote is an out and out favourite too - just beautiful, and so true.

My senses are certainly sharper now that the roads are little quieter and time stretches out a little further.  Or else the birds are singing more loudly all of a sudden!






The young girl puts in another appearance on the final spread (I'm pretty sure it's the same girl as was in the hat earlier), and you can see how confident she is in the beauty of the natural world.













I love how these two tags have a sort of ombre moving across them from the yellow-greens at the left to the more vivid blues over at the right.  Complete serendipity - I didn't know this particular front and back would end up playing together!






More of the gorgeous, rambling white embossed flower vines here (it's the Rubber Dance Weed Love stamp again - it's working overtime this spring here at Words and Pictures!).

And the large and small butterflies echoing one another on the facing pages really please me too, for some reason.

The back cover (happily) is one of the prints I wasn't so wild about - it was a bit too colourful! - but it's had plenty of white splatter and inking around the edges and lots of lid-stamped bubbles and I'm now fine with it being the end of the book.







So there you have it.  I know it's one of those War and Peace-length posts, but I really have tried to keep the chat to a minimum so that you can just focus on the photos.  One day soon I'm going to experiment with a bit of video filming, because I'm well aware that with a book, your best bet is to turn the pages on camera.  I'm not there yet, though, so here's a quick flip through to let you see the page spreads in their full connected glory.

If you hop over to A Vintage Journey you'll find lots more inspiration from my fellow Creative Guides who have all been enjoying the fact that It's Gelli Time!  We hope you'll be inspired to travel along with us at some point this month.  If there was ever a crafting activity to absorb your attention and distract you from everything that's going on, it's creating prints.

Thanks so much for stopping by today and bearing with me to the end of this mammoth blogpost.  This blog is my virtual scrapbook, so the record is for me too.

If something were to happen to this journal or if I decide to give it away/sell it, then I'll still be able to enjoy it (and have a record should I want to create something similar).





I hope you're all staying well, and that these light-filled, positive pages have given you some respite from the real world out there.  Stay safe and I'll see you soon.

Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.
Alice Walker

Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.
Confucius

Try It On Tuesday are hosting a theme called Beauty of Nature.  I'm guessing this won't be my only entry!!
At the Funkie Junkie Boutique Blog the challenge is April Showers Bring May Flowers - over my watery prints are lots of trailing flower tendrils, so I hope it will fit in well there too
The Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge has a Spring Moodboard this week - this is full of the joys of spring, but again, mainly those blues and greens from the top corner.
Tag Tuesday are looking for Bunnies and Butterflies - no bunnies I'm afraid, but plenty of butterflies and multiple tags!
At the Sweet Stampin' Challenge they want you to Make Your Own Background
As usual Anything Mixed Media Goes over at the Creative Artiste Challenge Blog
I'd also like to share this Gelli journal in the March/April challenge at Mini Album Makers
There's just time for one final entry at More Mixed Media where the theme is Anything Goes with an optional twist of Green
I'm always in two minds about whether insects count as animals, but I'm going to risk it and play along with Animal Magic over at Country View Challenges