Category Archives: sketch book

Sketchbook Update

Posted on by under sketch book, Sketching

I have been working in my sketchbook intermittently. I showed you the weeping birch sketch but thought I would play around with it in Photoshop to see if I could color the background. But I couldn’t figure out how to do that easily. I always forget how to use all the features and the complexity of the program always discourages me from trying much. But I can add filters to see the different effects.

Sketchbook - Weeping Birch cropped

Here’s the original.

Sketchbook - Weeping Birch bas relief

This is the bas relief filter. So it does give the effect of a colored background somewhat.

Sketchbook - Weeping Birch glowing edge

This filter is called glowing edge. Essentially just reverses the colors in this sketch.

Sketchbook - Weeping Birch palette knife

And this one is called palette knife. I think I could use this to carve a lino cut stamp. I might give it a try if I can get it transferred clearly enough.

Sketchbook - Yellow Hibiscus web

This is a recent sketch that I drew from a photo from my Hawaii trip. The scanner just didn’t pick up the shadows and the highlights on the flower very well. Maybe a photo of it would work better. Hope you have a good weekend. Thanks for stopping by.

 

 

Mono Printing on Gelatin Plate Party

Posted on by under sketch book

My local surface design group met today and we used our gelatin plates that we had made plus we used Gelli plates that you can buy commercially. The Gelli plates are much stiffer than the kind you can make on your own.

monoprints 10 web

We all brought tons of stuff to play with and a variety of kinds of paint.

You can see here the paint applied to the plate, using the brayer to roll it out and before printing. Sadly, I didn’t get what the print looked like.

Here are a variety of prints. I don’t remember which belong to which person but they were all unique.

monoprints 5 web

It was great fun and even though I still don’t like all my prints, at least a few of them are looking a little better.  I will scan in a few of my favorite ones and show you soon.

Mono Printing on a Gelatin Plate

Posted on by under printing, sketch book

Next week our surface design group is meeting and we’re going to be using Gelli plates for printing. I don’t have one and Paula found us a recipe on how to make one of your own. So I thought I would give it a try. It was simple and I already had most of the ingredients, just had to buy four more packets of gelatin.

Gelatin Plate

Here’s the gelatin plate that I made. It is about 8″ x 8″ I decided I really needed to try it out. So I played around with some acrylic paints, stencils and texture plates. There are tons of Youtube videos out there on how to do this and the Gelli Plate company has a really nice set of videos on their blog.

yellow and orange print

Here’s one of the first prints that I made. It only has two layers and definitely needs a few more. I wasn’t sure on how much paint to use. This one I used Golden fluid acrylics and they dried really quickly. Plus I needed to use more paint.

dark and light print

This one was a clean up sort of print. I added a few dots into the middle, let it dry and then added dark purple paint on top. Then you pull the print. It picks up the dried yellow paint on the plate as well as the purple.

Bark Print

This one is two layers with blue over orange-yellow through a stencil that is supposed to represent bark. It looks too much like an animal print to me though. I switched to the high flow Golden acrylics and really liked the way they printed better than the standard acrylics. They don’t dry out as quickly either.

Bark Ghost Print

I love this ghost print after the stencil is pulled off.

Butterfly Ghost Print

And here is another ghost print from a butterfly stencil. I always seem to like the ghost prints better than the first print pulled with the stencil in place.

Scrap Paper

And this is the paper where I cleaned off my brayer. It’s pretty cool too. Have you tried printing from a gelatin plate? It’s pretty fun. I have included the recipe to make your own below that Paula gave us if you’d like to give it a go.

Make Your Own Gelatin Plate Recipe

1 1/2 c. Water
3/4 cup glycerin (Walmart)
3/4 cup rubbing alcohol (70% is fine)
7 envelopes gelatin
7 x 7,  or  8 x 8 glass or metal pan without any texture on the bottom
(Walmart or the Dollar Store has good pans)

In a microwaveable bowl, mix cold water and gelatin together with a whisk. Add alcohol and glycerin into bowl, mix. Microwave 3 mins. Remove and stir. Repeat till mixture is hot and clear. The mixture may still have a yellowish color to it. Do not boil. It took Paula 4 round of 3 minutes in her microwave to get mixture clear an hot. It took me one round of 3 minutes. Microwaves are variable so just keep a close eye on it. Pour into pan and let set over night. Try to remove any air bubbles from the surface. The painting surface will be the bottom of the pan which will be very smooth. Make sure to use a glass pan that is smooth inside. When set, use your fingers to pull the gel from the edge of the pan.  Once suction is released, it will come out of pan easily. Do not use a knife.

The Results from More Landscape Painting

Posted on by under sketch book

I hope you aren’t tired of seeing these little landscapes I have been painting. They make great greeting cards so I have made a bunch to sell at the shop. If you haven’t seen these before, I learned the technique from Jude Atkin over on Start2. These are the paintings that I showed you last week with the plastic wrap still stuck to them. I added some details and then fused them to cards.

 

They always look better than I expect them to since sometimes when you pull the plastic wrap off, they don’t look all that good. I usually use a colored pencil to “fix” the mountain tops and then add in some watercolor paint to add some depth. Zed thought it might be a good idea to show everyone how to add the details as she didn’t think her “artistic capabilities” were up to it. So I think I will do a short tutorial on that and post it over on The Felting and Fiber Studio soon. Hope you have a good weekend!

Painting More

Posted on by under felting, sketch book

I wrote a post today about painting landscapes with salt and plastic wrap over on The Felting and Fiber Studio. I decided to paint some more today and I thought I’d show you what they look like in process.

You can see that they don’t look like much when you first start so if you’re trying this technique, don’t give up and don’t work on them too much. I was a bit more free the first time I did this technique and I think those will be better than this set but we’ll see. Just put the paint on quickly and apply the salt and plastic wrap and leave it alone. The colors in these are less diverse than my last set as well. So don’t try to picture what you want in advance and I think the results will be better.

moose

The other thing I have been working on is making tutorials from the projects that I wrote for my book. These projects didn’t get into the book because it was too long. So I am finally getting around to getting the tutorials together and turning them into PDF’s. I’ll be selling them on The Felting and Fiber Studio site and maybe here too if I get really ambitious. The first one is for this moose.