Gelli Plate Abstracts - Create Unique & Interesting Abstract Prints On Your Gelli Plate

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] I'm very inspired by different types of abstract art. I'm particularly inspired by the cold wax and oil medium that I see a lot of my very favorite artists using. I have the cold wax and oil paint and you may too. But some of the issues that I have with that is the dry time. It takes forever to dry. In-between all the different layers there may be a day or two or three in-between where things are drying before you get to the next element of your painting. I got to thinking, how can I do this in a similar way, but with acrylic paint, something that would give me a little bit less dry time, a lot less. [LAUGHTER] A lot easier to use and clean up and work at, at my table for an afternoon of art-making. That's how I came up with this class. I'm very inspired and I'll show you some of my inspiration through the cold wax and oil paint pieces. But I'm trying to recreate those with my Gelli plate and elevate some of the stuff that I get off a Gelli plate to a nicer, more elegant abstract look in the paintings. I think you're really going to enjoy some of the very interesting looks and techniques that I've created in this class for you to give a tryout. I can't wait to see what you're doing with your Gelli plate after you see some of these techniques. I'm Denise Love and I'm an artist and photographer based out of Atlanta, Georgia. In today's class, I want to show you how to use your Gelli plate in a different way than you might normally be thinking to use it or introduce you to the Gelli plate if you've never seen it before. You can come up with a one print of some paint that you've put on that plate, so it's a monoprint. I'm layering the different layers of paint to come up with beautiful abstracts. Most of the time when people are using a Gelli plate, they're making very kitsch things. Maybe it's first scrapbooking or maybe it's for collage work and maybe it's using stencils and things that are very cutesy and I want to use the Gelli plate in a way that's going to give me some very dynamic elevated abstract art pieces. I hope you loved the projects and the techniques that I'm going to show you in this class. Can't wait to see the ones that you make and the colors that you come up with. Definitely come back and share those with me. Let's get started. [MUSIC] 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Your class project is to come back and share any of the things that we painted today in class. I would love to see what inspired you, what colors you selected, and what your end abstract pieces looked like. So any of the different techniques that really inspired you. I'd love to see the projects that you created. Come back and share those with me and I'll see you in class. [MUSIC] 3. Inspiration: I wanted to talk a little bit about inspiration for where my head was when I was thinking of creating these pieces and I created several for myself, long before I created this class. Just because I'm fascinated with oil and cold wax. For some reason with the oil and cold wax, I've done quite a bit of it, but I've never personally mastered this layered look that I was going for. That probably just has to do with me experimenting and playing some more. But I got to thinking could I create this look that I love so much? Could I create that with acrylic paint? That's when I started playing around with my Gelli Plate and doing different types of print and stuff. I tell you one of the things in the class not to jab or drag sharp items on your Gelli Plate because you'll damage the plate. But you could drag some of these Gelli arts combs through it. Because as we're looking here, these are really soft and they'll create a design in your paint. As we're looking here at some of these oil and cold wax pieces, you can carve through them and create very interesting shapes. It's an interesting thing with the combs. I'm just very inspired by the colors and the layers. Look at that right there. Beautiful. I experiment with the Gelli Plate layering. I really loved this. I need to stick a piece of paper right in that page. I really love the look of cold wax and I like the way that they've done the colors and the layers. I'm just inspired by the abstractness of the pieces. This is a nice inspiration book. I'm also very inspired by Rebecca Crowell. She's my favorite cold wax artist to follow. I love all the texture and the dimension that she gets in her paintings. This book is like the Bible of cold wax. I look through and you see other artists and some of the things that they've done. Look how amazing this piece is. I like having the inspiration of the cold wax but thinking, how can I create that without dragging out all my oil paints and waxes? Look at these. That right there is so beautiful. I feel like with a lot of these abstracts, we've come very close to creating some of these looks and feel that I wanted within a medium that dries a lot faster and doesn't require days and days. That's the other thing with the cold wax. That's probably why I've gotten a little frustrated with creating these layered abstracts in the cold wax is because with every layer that you put on, there's some point where you're going to have to stop and wait a day or two and let that dry and add the next layer and wait a day or two and let that dry and add the next layer and wait a day or two and let that dry. When you see how many layers that I do on some of these pieces I create in class, you could easily be working on this piece for months, adding layers, scraping back, adding layers, combining colors, changing things. The time commitment is so great that I think I've just given up very quickly on some of these sometimes. You can see that we're using a similar tool is that she's using to paint these. That's a brayer that she's using to mesh paint in to get that next layer. These look exactly like the layers I'm getting with the Gelli Plate. I love that. Look at that right there. I just wanted to take a little look at what inspired some of my abstracts and then once I got through, some really loud stuff like that right there. Does that not look very much so like what we were just looking at? Some of these work out great. Some of these don't work out very great at all. Some of these are beautiful surprises because of whatever we were pulling off. Then I've got some that I'm just like, that's terrible, but I'm not going to throw it away because maybe it's a collage paper. Or maybe I could go back and keep adding layers to this and then I would definitely like it. But for the moment I've thrown it to the side. In today's class, I just wanted you to see what inspired the different projects. It didn't necessarily inspire these as much, but it still did because I was looking for some very dramatic ways to give me a punch. Then the little shapes and things was just another iteration of experimenting. But I really love the ones that look most like those abstracts that I was Googling. That's my inspiration and where this class started. Rebecca Crowell is my favorite cold wax artist. If you want to go look on her Instagram and just be inspired by some of her paintings and her color choices. Highly recommend her to see just things that blend that you might enjoy and might want to try with your Gelli Plate. I'll see you back in class. 4. Supplies: [MUSIC] Let's take a look at the different supplies that we're going to be using in class. We're going to be using first and foremost, a Gelli plate. A couple of different companies make the Gelli plates. I have some from Gel Press and some from Gelli Arts. The Gelli plates come in a lot of different sizes. They used to come in two or three sizes but over the past several years, they've really extended the offerings. I have several sizes. In class, I'll be using for my projects a five by seven because they're easier to work in the space that I film in and they're a really nice size to work on. I'm using a five by seven. The nice thing about a five by seven plate is you usually have plenty of time to spread the paint on and get your print without the paint drying terribly on you. When you get to the bigger plates, you'll want to mix your paint with some type of acrylic paint retarder. Golden makes a good one and you would mix it with about a third of the retarder and about 2/3 of paint. Then you would put that mixture onto your plate to get more time to roll it where you need it and to get your press. Because if you're doing the great big plate, that paint dries pretty fast and it's a real thin layer, so it may be drying and not giving you a good pressing. Just be aware of that if you're going to use a larger plate and your paint's drying too fast, that's the solution. I'm using a five by seven in class for the different projects. I'm going to keep it simple. I have a larger plate than the ones I just showed you. I also have a square six by six plate, so it comes in all sizes but for the purpose of the things I'm showing you, five by seven is a great size. I'm also using acrylic paint. You can use the acrylic craft paint. You can use the acrylic flow paint, the high flow paints. I really like the medium flow, like these acrylic basics by Liquitex because it comes in so many different colors. I have a few large tubes of this. But I decided that because I don't have that many colors in the large tubes, there's all brands here. Let me just pull a few of these out. I got some Amsterdam, I got some Master's Touch, I've got some Liquitex basics. These are the ones that I prefer when pouring in this technique because there are medium viscosity and they roll really nicely on the plate and they give you a good pressing. It's available in lots of colors. It's generally probably a little cheaper to get those than it is to get these high flow paints. I'm using some of these in class because I have them. There are color that I like. I think, let's try this with this color. But it's not necessary to use the most expensive paints that you have with the Gelli plates so don't feel like you have to go out and buy lots of expensive paint. What I did myself was I thought I really want to try out all these basics colors without buying those gigantic tubes of paint, which are 5, 6, $8 each, I really want to be able to test out all the colors I can. Then go back and buy bigger tubes of the ones I love. I actually found this Liquitex 48 set, and these are 0.74 of an ounce and those bigger ones are four ounces. But it's plenty of paint for everything that I wanted to do in class. Then also did lots of projects that I did before class. It has so many yummy colors in it that I got to try out. Now, will tell you if you go for this yummy little 48-box set. Price shop these because I found these on Amazon for $45 and some change. I found that my Michael's in stock for $70. I was like, are you kidding me? $35 more. I don't know if they're claiming that for supply chain issues or what. But I would recommend that you price shop something like this if it looks appealing and that's what you want to do. Otherwise, pick out your favorite colors of whatever paints you have and roll with that because you certainly don't need to buy any additional paints. I'm using some of what I had, I wanted to experiment with those other colors and that particular brand and viscosity. I thought, I'm going to try this little 48 cents and see what we can do. You need acrylic paint. [LAUGHTER] You also need these rubber brayers. This is what we roll the paint on our plate with. I have two different sizes and I use them all through class and these are my favorite too, this is the standard with on this one. Here's a newer one because I like to have a clean one. These are by speed ball, both of these are. This one, the bigger one is the four-inch and the smaller one is the two-inch. Two-inch and four inches. I use both of these in class and I like having both of them, so you might consider that. Then I also like having a clean one that's never been used because I use it to roll the back of my paper to really get a good pressing. I have three of these. You don't need three if you only want one, get one in the four-inch. This is the hard rubber. This is not soft rubber, it doesn't have holes in it. It's not squishy. This is the hard rubber roller that we're talking about. I also like using these silicone paint brushes. This is Master's Touch, this one-and-a-half inches, a nice size. I like them because they're silicone. I can go and just let this sit in water and I can just rub any paint that I've let dry on my brush, I could just rub it back off. I like this because it's not like a paintbrush. You're not getting lines like a paintbrush. You can use it to spread on your Gelli plate or spread little extra paint on a print. It's a nice piece to have. Also like using a disposable palette paper so I've got a Number 12 paper palette that I'm using all through class to spread paint, clean my rollers, do lots of stuff. I also have some shop towels that I like to clean up with. In some of the projects, I'm also using mixed media paper. I like the mixed media paper over watercolor paper, here is some samples. Because mixed media paper is smooth, it's going to give you a clean print, you're still going to get texture and variety. Whereas watercolor paper, because I really wanted to do some nice high-end abstract T things. The water paper and I do like these, but it's different than the mixed media paper. It's got so much extra texture in it that I was like, no matter what layer it is, you've got extreme texture. If that's the look you're going for, cold press watercolor paper is what you want to do. I did not want extreme texture. I wanted some layers that could be smooth and some layers that could be textured and I wanted the choice. Whereas this was a little harder for me to get the look I was thinking, even though in the end I really loved the pieces that I got. This is cold press watercolor paper and this is mixed media paper. In class, I'm using the mixed media paper. I'm using the pre-cut pages. These are 6 inches by 8 inches, which is 16.2 by 20.3 centimeters, because it's a good size to play and experiment with, and then I've got larger pieces for the larger jelly plates if I wanted to make a bigger print size, I have more of the mixed media paper to do that with. In some of the projects, we're going to use Yupo paper to make some stencils for ourselves. That's how we made some stencils for these shaped ones. We also, in some of these projects, are going to use some pre-made stencils. When I say pre-made, it's not really a stencil so much as like leftover sequence stuff. I'm using punchinella, which is the leftover parts when they cut out sequence. It's my favorite stencil to use and I get these off Amazon. You can also use other grungy stencily things. I just wanted it as a touch, very slight in some of my paintings. Now that they're all done, I'm not sure you can even see where I use the punchinella, but I do show you in one of these projects how to use some stenciling if you wanted to. I shy away a little bit from the stencils on these nicer abstracts because I don't want it to be too kitschy or too crafty. I wanted these to look more like fine art, high-end pieces rather than scrap bookie, collage elements, things like that. I wanted these to be able to be framed as beautiful, high-end abstracts. Kitschy stenciling like little flowers or something in it. Just didn't fit in with the view that I had for this particular set of projects, but I do like punchinella with anything. [LAUGHTER] Then I also have tape that I tape off my pieces with. Some of these all through class was white and then I ran out of the white so I've got the black. You could use painter's tape. I have plenty of painter's tap. I liked this thickness, which is not very thick at all. It's about a centimeter, I think. Let's see. It's about a centimeter thick, which is about not quite half an inch, just under half an inch. I like that better than this one that's right at an inch big because I want clean edges and I wanted that clean edge to be about a half an inch. I didn't want it to be the inch large. You can get painter's tape in different sizes and so if you can get that in the half inch size, that's the size I really liked for these. Because we're not taping it down to our work surface using these and moving them around like this. I want to be able to set it to the side and move around. Because I'm not taping it down to my surface, it's not like half this tape is on the surface and half this tape is on my page. This is too wide. Just throwing these ideas out etching when you're out looking and you're thinking, [LAUGHTER] you want the thinner one. Then the other thing that I'll talk about in class. Let me tell you what you don't want. You probably don't want acrylic inks as much as the acrylic paints because the acrylic inks are a little splotch here, but you'd have to experiment with those. I did end up playing with the inks as some mark-making on top at the end. I do like having some of the inks, but I don't love them in the working on the jelly plate as much as I did the solid or paints. Now that I'm actually looking harder at this, this is actually my watercolor ink, which worked great on top. That could be why I was getting some splotchiness in some of the projects. I probably need to go where I can get the acrylic inks I've got over there. [LAUGHTER] I would recommend acrylic inks on top and then you can experiment and play on the jelly plate, but they are so thin and liquidity that I just found that the thicker paint is more my preference so you just need to experiment there. I also talk about cleaning your jelly plate. It's a mineral oil on that plate. They recommend that you clean that with baby oil, which is mineral oil. This is how you'll clean it up really good and get the paint off. I'll show you in one of the videos how to clean your jelly plate and that's what I'm using to do that. I think that is everything that I've got here for in-class. I've got several different types of abstracts that we do in class. I hope you have some fun creating these with me. I can't wait to see what you come up with. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 5. Cleaning The Gelli Plate: Let's talk about cleaning our tools. I've got a dirty jelly plate here and I'd like to start a new project. In this one, I would really like to not have all this extra paint on my plate. I usually keep my plates stuck to the plastic that it comes attached to on the back side. But if you ever take this plastic off, they say not to put the plastic back on, because when you put this on, you end up with air bubbles in it, and the air bubbles will create great big divots in your plate that then don't print correctly. So if you ever take both sides off, don't put that back on. What they say to do is clean your jelly plate, and then just put a piece of printer paper on top to store it and make sure you put it down really good and get all the bubbles off. Then when you're ready to use it again, it's ready. So the jelly plate is made up of mostly mineral oil. You can add water to your plate and clean it off like that. But a lot of these really baked on, I guess you could say, really dried good spots may not just come off with water. So you want to clean your plate with baby oil. It's made up of mineral oil. Baby oil is mineral oil. They say that you can clean the plate really nicely with the mineral oil. So basically what I do is just spread the oil on here. Baby oil is good for your skin, so don't worry about getting it on your skin. Let that soak in some and really do its thing. Then you'll notice that you can then just peel the paint write-off and we can take a towel and help with that cleaning off if we want. Then if one layer of the baby oil doesn't get everything off, then do another layer of the baby oil. But this is how you're going to get a really beautifully clean jelly plate. They say that you should clean your plate in-between uses and not store it with the paint on it. I'll be honest, I'm a lazy jelly plate owner and I don't normally clean it between every single use. But I want a clean plate for the next project that I'm thinking of. So I thought I would just go ahead and take this opportunity to clean this off and talk about cleaning the jelly plate. So let's just really just working it very gently. Not scraping down really hard or using any tools on top of the gel. I don't want to ruin the surface or create deep crevices that are going to really ruin my plate. Now I'm just taking my towel. This is just a shop towel and just really gently but firmly getting any of this paint off the surface. My reasoning here is because, you know, as you put more paint on top of paint that's dried on there, loosens that paint up so it ends up on your piece that we saw that on some of the projects that I did in class. I want to make some abstracts where the color is very solid, firm. I don't want to have any of this paint coming off. I've managed to get paint on the back. I'm going to go ahead and peel this off and clean the back side. I got paint on the plastic now that I see that so that's not such a big deal. Let me get rid of these paint chips on here. Then I'm just going to not always had the plastic on both sides, so I must have taken it off at some point. We can just put white paper on the back side after we clean it good. This is how you preserve that jelly plate from getting dry and becoming unusable too because it's made of this mineral stuff. This is how you're going to keep that good and really make the longevity of your plate. I've got some paint on the edges. I don't care so much about the edges I'm just trying to make sure that I definitely get the paint off the top and get rid of any spare paint chips that are sticking to it. I'm just going to stick a piece of paper on the back side. Front side is clean so I'm not worried about the backside. But I just wanted to cover cleaning it and then storing it. Storing it, just wipe it off really good paper on the top, make sure you got any air bubbles out. Then you can store that with the two pieces of paper on there and then the next time you are ready to use it, you just peel that paper off and you're ready to go. Bugs me to have it on the edge, but it doesn't really matter if it's on the edge. I could get real picky and clean it off of every surface. It's just peeling off as I'm saying that. So that is how easy it is to clean and store the jelly plate. They say don't store it with the plastic on it because you create the air bubble divots. So once you put the paper on, just get the divots, any air bubble out from under the paper. Then that's ready to be stored and we're actually now ready to use our jelly plate again. On your tools, let's talk real quick about the tools. I noticed that on my rollers they eventually stopped rolling, and I have to go and clean the paint off of the edges and offer this little one, I got it off the edges and then I thought, oh, it's still not rolling very easily. Then I noticed that there was paint on the edge here that had built up that was then stopping the wheel. So I had to get the paint off the edge in there and I just did that with a flat palette knife and just scrape that out of there pretty easily. If you've got paint on the brush that you're not able to easily peel off. You know, you can just set this in a thing of water and it will loosen those layers of paint so you can just get it scraped off really easily. So now I've got two cleaner, not 100 percent clean, but cleaner rollers ready to do whatever my next project is. I'll see you back in class. 6. Learning To Layer Colors: [MUSIC] In this project, I'm going to take some inspiration from my pieces that I've done in the past. This blue set is one one my absolute favorite so I thought I would do a blue set to add to this series. The other favorite that I have over here is this set with the browns and some ocher with a little tiny bit of blue thrown in. I'm just looking at all the paints that I have here. To do this blue set, I'm going to lay down a layer of orange because I actually laid down a layer of orange underneath here so that it would just sparkle through a tiny bit from the colors I put on top. Sometimes it doesn't show at all, but it is fine to just have that just in case. I'm just pulling out of my little Liquitex Basics, the cadmium red light hue, which is an orange hue. Then I'm pulling blue light out of my Blick matte acrylic paints because I like this grayish blue shade. I also might pull up brighter blue over here out of my Liquitex Basics just in case. Maybe this light blue permanent. Then I've also got a Payne's gray. For some reason, in my Liquitex Basics, there's either not a Payne's gray this dark or I'm just not recognizing it as I'm looking through. It may have a Payne's gray, but I don't see it. If it's in here, it's a lighter blue than I think it should be. I want this really dark, Payne's gray. Then I've got a great big Titan Buff, which I've got a pretty cream color, and my Liquitex. Unbleached titanium. I might be using one of those. I think that's going to be my colors for a blue set. Then if we go on to say make this brownish set, then I might pull together a few of these. I think I still might use that blue and then I'm feeling like I need a burnt umber, maybe yellow ocher. Possibly, [NOISE] I'm over here in these browns because I've got all these sitting in like this. I definitely want this burnt umber, yellow oxide, maybe this raw sienna, [NOISE] and then a little bit of this blue possibly, and this titanium. I feel like those might be my colors for both of these colorways. I'll just set those to the side, shut telling you where my thinking is there, and then let's make a few Gelli plates. The first thing that we're going to need to do is I want to do three pulls of each of these. Two of the pulls are going to be the actual art piece that I'm attempting. [LAUGHTER] Then the third pull is going to be what we call the ghost pull, where I'm just pulling extra paint off my Gelli plate. Sometimes the ghost pull is my very favorite of all of them. It serves two purposes. One, you get the extra paint that you can off of your Gelli plate, and two, the pull is an amazing piece of art in itself. I've decided after doing lots and lots of these, let me just grab that stack again that I had, that I really like it when it's got a firm edge and you can pull the tape and everything is confined in that square. Some of these, where I did not tape the edge, it's a little more crooked. It is sometimes just as interesting. This is another piece that I really, really love, but you can tell on these that they weren't taped and then there's paint on the edges and they're just not as neat on end product as they are when we're purposely trying to create with the edges taped. The edges are taped here. This was my ghost pull and I didn't tape the edges. Now I'm going to even tape the edges on my ghost pull because I love this piece, but I don't want all of the dirtiness on the edges. I want it to look like a pretty finished piece of art in itself. So I'm going to tape the edges even on my trash paper, basically. Those are really some of my favorite at the end. I'm just taping it off and moving it around. I'm not worried about extra tape leaning off the paper here because what you can do to keep these edges out of your way is just fold them on themselves like this and then we're ready to start using that to pull prints from. If you have any big pieces that you think are going to stick on something, just fold those down on themselves. We've almost got my third one taped. This will be the third. I like doing this in a series of three because then you have a nice little series. You could definitely do more than three but I wouldn't do less than three unless you're just going to do a pull and then a ghost pull. Your choice there. I tend to like them in series of two or three, so I like to pull three prints as I'm going. Now we are ready, I have my Gelli plate, got my paints here. Let's just push these back a little bit. I've got my Gelli plate over here. It's still dirty from stuff I was playing with last night. That doesn't bother me. I don't mind if this extra paint ends up on my pull. This plate that I'm working with today is the five by seven plate and we're just going to have some little brayers over here that I use to roll the paint into my Gelli plate. I have a clean brayer that I use on the ghost pull usually, to really push the paper down and not get paint on the backside. I do have a clean brayer over to the side ready also. [NOISE] The little brayer are mostly used for little details and additives near the end. If we look at the little blue pieces here, you can see I've come back in, added some extra little dark details as I was going at the end because I really like the pieces to have a nice amount of contrast and depth and dimension with all that pattern. Sometimes as you're layering things, if you had a dark layer underneath and you layer to layer things on top, you lose some of the really dark details that might be nice just to have them brought back a little bit. That's what I use the little one for a lot, so got it to the side. You want to be careful with how much paint you let buildup here on your brayer because it builds up on the edges. I go through and I pick the extra paint off the edges occasionally because it'll stop it from rolling if you get too much paint on the edges. I will go through and clean the paint off of this one before I start rolling extra paint on the top because it's impeding the brayer rolling now because it has so much paint build-up here on the edge. You can see I can just pull that paint off with my fingernail with just a layer that builds up on the end of a roller. Now in addition to getting your paint off the end of your rollers, if it builds up, you also want to keep your paint not too thick on the rollers themselves and really keep cleaning it off because the paint builds up on here. Then each time you get more acrylic paint on it, it might let loose some of the paint underneath and then it will create different paint splotches on your piece that may look great and may not look great. You just want to be careful with your tools, keeping them fairly clean if you can, so that you don't have unintended marks and things end up on your print. Let's start with the orange, and I've got orange on my plate here, and I'm just putting a little bit of paint on the actual plate, and I'm just going to roll that paint around until I get a nice thin layer. You don't want the layers on here to be super thick because then they transfer funny on your paper and I'm just guesstimating here, it doesn't have to be perfect when I put my page down. I'm guesstimating about where the print is going to be. If I end up with some edges, that's okay, that's going to be some interest layer in my piece. There's my first poll, I can add some more paint to that. You want to work fairly quickly because acrylic paint dries very quickly in these thin layers on your piece. This too is another reason why I like working on multiple pieces at the same time because it dries pretty fast on your paper also. So by the time I get back to that first piece, it's dry and is ready for me to put another layer. We will look at that one. Now you can see that I've had some dirty splotches or dirty paint or whatever leftover on my Gelli plate and so that transfers onto the new print, but I don't mind that for my abstracts. But if I were doing something where that was a big deal, then I would clean the Gelli plate up quite a bit better. The thin layers of paintwork very quickly and then have your papers ready to pull your prints. Do all of that taping off right at the beginning. Then when you're on that third ghost print, I just take my clean one and you can do this on any of those prints. You don't have to wait till your last one, but I definitely want as much paint off as possible by the third one. You can see how much we pulled off of that plate and you can see I have definite other colors that I have pulled from that. There's our first layer and out of those, when I say sometimes that ghost print is my very favorite because I've held that down so wonderfully tight with the brayer. Look at all those layers that are already built in from the paint that was stuck on my Gelli plate. That right there, we could probably call that done. We can say that's our print and go, but I do want to go ahead and layer these with the blues, I want these to be blue pieces. Now I still got paint on my roller, I've got some paper over here, the disposable palette paper, and I'm just rolling the roller on there. I will be putting paint on here and using that to roll paint also, but to start with, I'm using that as a trash paper for the moment and that could be too much paint, but we'll see. That's why I like having three papers also because if you roll this and you're like, whoa, too much paint, you can pick your least favorite. Let's do the first one. If we had too much paint in that transfer, then that's pretty though, then it's not as big a deal. I don't want to ruin something when I'm doing this right here, I'm not moving the paper. I'm being very careful to move my hand but not move that paper. You'll notice I had enough paint on there that I decided not to roll another layer of paint and I have enough paint on my roller for my ghost print since that pulled off pretty good. Then I can just clean the roller off here on my paper. I don't want thick layers to build up on that paper. Look at that. That's what might be my favorite. See if you'll do more than one. If you do one and you think it's not turning out the way I like, but then you do two and you're like, this might be getting there and that third one you're like, I think that's my favorite. Then you get excited about your pieces because you've got something that you liked where it's just hard sometimes. [MUSIC] 7. Working Layers & Brayer Marks: [MUSIC] Now in this third color, there's plenty of paint in this thing. But it's gotten thicker and I don't want the paint everywhere. I just want the paint some places. I'm just going to see, if I put this on here like that, then what can I get in that one spot? That's very light, so that's not going to show up, so very interesting. Let's do the cream instead, for the moment and we'll come back to the blue. My paint could still be too wet too. I might not have to let this dry enough if I had enough paint on there. So you could use a heat gun in-between layers. Oh, yeah. That's exactly what I'm thinking. Let's do that. You could use a heat gun in between the layers if you want to make sure each layer is dry, because sometimes, I'm going to put it on the whole thing. But I only want it on one part of my prints. I'm only going to push it down on part of the print. If you put too many layers in a row pretty fast, then it might be too thick and you'll want to let it dry some. Oh, okay. This is my favorite one [LAUGHTER] let's roll this pretty good. See, that just gets cooler and cooler and cooler. I want to go back to the blue. Now, let's see if I can get some blue. It doesn't matter if you mix the colors on your power a little bit, that's perfectly fine. See, it's almost dry to the touch. If you've got paint on your fingers that would get on your paper, but that's okay. Its closer we're getting there. I'm not trying to exactly mimic my original piece that we were showing you, I'm just going by feel and looking at it and thinking, "I like what that did, kind of thing". It's not any specific thing that I'm looking for or doing, it's a little bit more about feeling and just feeling your way through the process. Now at this point, what we could do is, I do have extra paint here on my palette that I did not intend to leave there. So I might have another spare piece just as my true trash paper. But Murphy's Law says that the end, I still might love this one. But you want to get as much paint off of that as you can. See, that's pretty cool. So I'm going to set that to the side. We'll set this to the side for a moment. I'm feeling like I want to go ahead and do some brayer rolling to get some of these colors moving in the direction that I'm thinking to. So maybe I want some of these titanium. This is Titan Buff, sorry. You can use any paint. I'm using the larger fluid acrylic because I have it and I didn't want to go buy a large one of the acrylic basics because I have a little one if I need it. Look at that. Using your brayer on your piece after you get some of these layers in here, is what makes this exciting to me. [LAUGHTER] look at that. Let's go ahead and do a little bit to this one. I'm only using that one because that's what I have not because it's better or worse. I don't want big splotches a color like this. Let's stop at that right there for a moment. But yeah, if you've got the fluid acrylic or you've got the medium acrylic and you've got a specific color that you like, either one of these is fine, for this kind of technique. I do like the medium thickness of these. I like that a lot. It's not super necessary. Either way is fine. Let's do some of this blue over here. I'm going to go with the little brayer. Just see. I like that. Now I don't think I've gotten my Payne's gray anywhere. Let's put that one right here. I like that I can now add the darkness to the top because right now we are shy or contrast. I'm trying to be careful. I don't want this to look like a little brayer all over it. Kind it does, but I don't want it to completely look like a little bitty brayer. I am being careful. Then if there's any thick pieces of paint that have come off your roller into your paint, go ahead and scoot that out of the way because you probably don't want that on your finished piece. Look at that one. I'm loving that one. So let's go back. Like say a real thick glob of paint on there from some extra piece on our roller. I want to go ahead and get rid of those. I don't want them to stay in my piece, so go ahead when you see it and be real careful about those. Let's pull this Payne's gray. I want the darkness in there. Way too much. Definitely going to have to get me some more of this Payne's gray. This is the golden, the Payne's gray. But I do like on blue pieces to have some Payne's gray available. [NOISE] We'll go ahead and put more blue on here. Come back with my lighter colors again because I just feel like there was just no contrast showing up for us here. Another thing that you can consider and I'm going to be using in one of our other projects is a silicone paintbrush instead. Just to take a look at that. Let's do this with silicone brush. Just to look at the differences because I might go back on our other one and add some light things back in there. You can see with the brush, we can maybe get some color moving out there in a different way than the brayer does. That's interesting to experiment with that and see, is that going to give us the look we want. [NOISE] Just throwing that out there. You can play with that too, just to give you some ideas. Let me add some dark blue to our last piece here. You want to be careful when you're putting this on this brayer, that you don't have a dark spot because that dark spot is what shows up and then goes. That's fine. Let's let that one dry. Let's put this one over here. Let's go back to our first one. [NOISE] Maybe I'll put some more in this light down now. It's all just a little back-and-forth game until you're like, Oh, all right, I feel like I'm there. If you get too much paint on your brayer, it quits rolling. I like using the brayer too because we stay within that jelly plate look. Even though I do want to change it up a little bit. Look at this. From just solid jelly plate where to really finish it off. It really keeps the whole look, jelly plate-ish because I'm still rolling that paint really flat. I like that jelly plate look. Look at that. That's looking pretty good. All right. Let's work on this. See how we can make a spot disappear a little bit by just rolling a little extra paint on top of it. If you end up with something that's weird and you're like, Oh, I didn't want that spot there. Let it dry a little bit. Come back with a tiny bit of extra paint in another color. I like that. You do want to keep in mind where you put that roller down and roll from, because like right there I created like a line that I didn't intend because I started it and went to the side, and it looks like I stopped and started something or I didn't intend to, so like that. Let's pull back this one. [NOISE] Just letting these dry a little bit and coming back, adding more layers. If you really like a color underneath, like say that orange, you want to pull some back in, then you might pull some back in with your silicone brush. This is the Master's Touch painters, silicone tipped brushes here. I've got a couple of sizes. I might like even like one that's a little wider, so just other tools. You could also use [NOISE] a catalyst wedge possibly if you're thinking. Oh, I have the wedge, can I use the wedge? You could probably use the wedge just fine. I'm getting really nice control with the brush and that's what I happened to have over here at the table when I was thinking, maybe I could play with this brush. [LAUGHTER] I got some blue paint on there. Let me get some more paint. Acrylic paint dries really fast. When you're doing a really large paintings you need to consider, especially with the jelly plate getting some retarded by golden like acrylic retarder because that will help with keeping that paint wet a little bit longer. You know see now what I don't like about using a brush as you totally change the texture of a specific area that you were working in, and not wanting to have one area that's a different texture than say the rest of my piece. That could be the look you're going for, but that's not really the look I'm going for. Now, I'm just back-and-forth it until I'm like, Oh, this is where I want it and I feel done. I just want to edge it off here if I can a little bit. [NOISE] Oh, yeah, see I like that. I don't like that. [LAUGHTER] I'm just going to come back with a little bit of this cream and push that dark back some. I can let it dry. There we go. That's what I wanted. I could let it dry before I do that, but I'm just pushing that back a little bit. I really like that one. That's completely different than my original ones. It's a little heavier in the choppiness. It's like a little more pattern in there, but I still love it. Let's call that one for the moment and come back to our original piece here and just see. I like that. I also wants a lighter color all through this front part here. [NOISE] If you get too much paint on your roller, it almost works against you so keep a towel over here to work that off if you need to. I want more of a center focal point on this. Let's put this on the jelly plate and see if we can make that because this is drier. It's probably not why I just did that, but it is overall a little drier. There we go. That's more what I wanted. Then maybe a little more with the blue, so maybe I'll do this one. Let this dry a tiny bit. [NOISE] We're okay. We're getting closer. Let's take our true junk piece so I can get some more of this paint off of my roller before it really dries. Where's my clean brayer? Here we go. Oh yeah, that one's looking super cool. Look at that. [LAUGHTER] Let's see. [NOISE] Yeah, I like that. Maybe a tiny bit more of that bluish color. [NOISE] [MUSIC] 8. Finishing Layers & Details: [MUSIC] That's pretty cool. I think I'm loving that one right there, so let's set that right here. I like that. It's almost like I want some black on one of these, a mix of the black and the blue maybe. [NOISE] This was just the Vallejo lamp black just because I have it not for any other reason. Yes, now I feel like I'm getting that dark. That's what's going to do it for me. Just feel like there needs to be that little bit of contrast. There we go, so loving the extra contrast that gave me. I think that's what I was looking for here with the blue. In my original piece that I did quite a long time ago, I must have mixed the Payne's gray and the black and just not remembered that I did that. [LAUGHTER] Look at that right there. I do have like one little fun secret that I do when I really love something. If I want to remember the colors later is that I really love the colors. I really love this really strange combination here that I did. If I really love it, I will actually then create myself a cheat card of what those colors were, and if you're really remembering it in the layer that you did it. So maybe I did the red oxide first and some raw sienna on top and then the yellow Naples and then the gray and the green, so that you can then keep this with these pieces and then you'd know later, here's how I did that, I want to do it again, or if you wanted to record of what you used. On our first piece which remember this one was our ghost pull, this last one. Let's go back one more time and really get these darks, dark. [NOISE] Then I'm feeling pretty good about those. Before you get too far and too excited and you start pulling the tape off of your pieces, don't let the paint sit too long on your rollers and then maybe go wash them off because dried paint on the roller is not your friend. I'm loving these. At this point right here, there was a lot of back-and-forth, and I don t know that I'm going to love all three pieces equally but let me tell you, pulling the tape is what makes the magic for these. Let's just start pulling some tape. Then we can look at it. I'm already loving that. It's going to see a tinge of orange shining through this one. [LAUGHTER] See, pulling the tape is what just elevates it instantly to a finished piece. You'll notice on these that I was strictly doing paint. I wasn't doing mark-making. I wasn't doing extra pens and pencils and things like that or scraping through the paint, but we could certainly scrape through the different layers and make marks if you wanted. Oh, yeah. Maybe not my favorite. This one might be my favorite, we'll see, but after you do a couple of these and you're like, I think I got it, I love the colors, I'm really loving what I'm getting, then throw some other techniques in there, but I wanted these to be pure Gelli plate and brayer, look at that, just to see what could I get as a color, abstract pure sample. Got a tiny bit of paint. There we go and look at that. Here is my blue set that I did today. I'm actually really loving this and I might go through and do a brown set just as a second collection to see what is another colorway, but I like that you saw the whole process as I was doing it and thinking it. When I'm doing the set of three like this, I do easily spend 30 or 45 minutes on this set of three just going back and forth between the color and the pattern. Let me pull some of my originals back up here just to look at some of these. Here's some other blues that I did. This one actually, I can even see some brown in there, so I must have brought some burnt umber in. Then I really love the brown sets. This one I was playing with teal and some maroon and some cream, and when the blue and the red blended, we got some purple that just naturally mixed. How fun is that? Here we've got some of turquoise, green and some cream and some sienna and some ocher, and a darker red here. Just experiment and play. There are going to be plenty of ones that turn out good. This was a very unusual set, red oxide, raw sienna, Naples yellow hue, natural gray Number 5, and green gold, and it was in all of these little Liquitex basics, and I was like, "I love this set so much." There is a little bit of mark-making in here with a sharp tool. I love the one that doesn't have any mark-making at all just because of the way the color pool, there's so much texture in there. There's enough of these that some turn out beautiful. I did these pink ones. This one's got marks all in it. Super fun but there's plenty that I was like, "I hate these." This is a ghost pull, I love that, but some of these, I'm like, "No, that's a failure." I didn't like that at all. I didn't like this one. Terrible. So much heavy paint on it, didn't like it. I didn't really care for this one, but it's actually okay, but I didn't really care for it. Some of these are going to work out great. Some of these you're going to end up and say, "My goodness, most favorite pieces I've ever created. This one's got a little mark-making in it. I might do one more set in browns and stuff just to see what can I get in a different colorway, but these are super fun for today's project. I'm going to let you go and maybe experiment in some colors of your own, and I'll come back and do another set, and we'll do some mark-making because I want to talk about mark-making in your Gelli plate. I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 9. Different Colors & Mark Making: [MUSIC] On this set, I've got paint still on my jelly plate, but this is the very first layer. So I am going to just go with it and let that be on the jelly plate instead of going through and doing a hard cleanup. If you don't want residue color from earlier pieces, then you definitely need to get that off before you start your next set. This set, I'm going to do the browns. Look at that, such a great color. I'm going to start off with a layer of gold. Not worrying about where on my paper, I've got it taped. I don't mind overlapping edges. Then let's just get in the last color here off of our thing and you see three is just perfect for the jelly plate. See pretty, pretty. All three. Got a fun little variation there. Let's talk about doing some mark-making. Let's do another layer. Maybe this next layer up is going to be, this is yellow oxide, raw sienna. Let's do a layer with the raw sienna. Maybe I'll do some mark-making a little bit on the raw sienna layer. Just to talk about it for a second. Look at that. Let me pull this one here real quick before that completely dries on our plate. Let's leave that. When we're using a sharp tool or a pencil or anything that could jab into something. You never want to use that. Look at that, pull the extra paint. I love that serendipity that we get. Let's say that we've put this on here and you're thinking, I want to mark-make right on my piece. You never want to do that because you're going to be jabbing your tip of whatever you're using right into your jelly plate, and denting a scar into it like you're physically slicing. Oh, look at that one. I love that. You're basically digging down into it and making a scar that's going to be permanent that paint could get into. You never want to mark-make, write directly on your jelly plate. You want to work quickly with each piece and then maybe mark-make in the wet paint on your piece itself. Yes, this paint is drying pretty quickly and I'm using something to scrape in the paint so it may or may not scrape very easily, but scraping with a sharp tool is one of my favorite way to put marks into things. This tool is over there with your clay tools at the craft store. It's like an ice pick is what it looks like, but it's for clay, it's in those clay tools. But you could also mark-make with pencil, pens. You can mark-make with different items, like this is just graphite, just a pencil or maybe I want some marks in here. You can, on these layers, do anything that you can normally do with acrylic paint. We could use a pencil. You want to be careful using oil pastels, like the real oily ones, because this is acrylic paint and you can't put more acrylic paint on top of that. This is a Stabilo, which is one of my favorite mark-making pencils. It draws on just about everything. I can get some good marks with a Stabilo. Maybe we'll just do some scribbling in there as an underlayer that we may or may not see. You can see that's much more prevalent than the scratches or the graphite. Just be careful and experiment with what you put on some of these layers as the mark-making item. Because we're putting more acrylic paint on top of this, and you have to think, oh, wait, will acrylic paint go on top of that? So oil, creamy oil pastels don't usually take acrylic paint on top of it, so I wouldn't do that. If you wanted to do chalk pastels or something like that, you could probably do that as an upper layer, but those are powdery, so I would save that in my finishing layers. This is the titanium and bleached titanium. I really do like, look at that. I like all that texture that the brayer created. Don't be afraid to let your brayer to create some of these marks and textures. I'm going to show you another trick too, I think in a moment, hang on. Look at that. Oh my goodness, see this set? I'm always glad when I go ahead and say, okay, let's do one more colorway because sometimes the first thing I think of in the day is not my favorite. Then I'll add to it and I'll be like, oh yeah, we're getting there. I don't know about you, but some people can be in their art room all day and just work, work on all the stuff they got to do. I get exhausted. [LAUGHTER] I think it's because I get so excited [NOISE] that then it's just overwhelmingly exhausting by the time I'm done playing and experimenting. Let's do our brayer here and really get this last layer off but I'm tired. So I'm not one of those people that can stay in my art room for days and days, and days and hours, and hours and hours. It's not going to be 40 hours art-making. Sometimes for me, I'm just in-between these, just absolutely beat up. Let's go back with some brown. This one, I'm moving a little faster. I'm going to show you one more thing. Let me go grab it. Super quick. I want to show you one more thing. I need some more paint on here. I want to show you maybe using some stencils on your jelly plate. This is not quite in the same way that a lot of people are using stencils because a lot of the jelly plate things look very crafty to me. I'm not really looking for crafty. I'm looking for more interesting. See, look at that. I've made this pattern on here. I don't want it everywhere. Let's just see if I spread my finger in certain areas. Look at that. I don't want so many stencils and the line to be where it looks like I'm creating like a crafty scrapbook page. I really am looking to create beautiful, high-end abstract pieces. I don't want this to look like I'm working in my art journal doing a couple of, that was fun right there, doing something real crafty. I want this to end up something amazing and high end. In doing that, I'm going to be real careful if I do stencil work to pick things that are going to fit in with the aesthetic that I'm shooting for. On the second pool that really put in a little tiny bit of those holes without looking cutesy. Like that's what I'm trying to avoid in my abstract art. I'm not wanting it to look super cutesy. Now, this is pretty cool and I will put a layer on top of that to push some of this pattern further back. So It's a little closer in with how this looked but I wanted to show you how easy it is to use stencils. This is punchenella which is the stuff that they punched stencils out of, and it's the leftover paper. This is my favorite stencil and you can buy punchenella online I got a pack of several different types of punchenella, different sizes and stuff off Amazon. You can also get some of those ranger stencils that look like grunge things, those are fun. I just would avoid things that look too cutesy. For higher-end piece of abstract. Like I personally am hoping to create. I think I'm going to do a layer of some of the white. I'm using the fluid buff titanium because I have a big thing of it. Oh, look at that. I like when I get this texture too in my paint itself with the brayer because I feel like that adds to the final piece with some of the texture that we might get from that. Oh yeah, so we've pushed a lot about way, way back. I don't like that it made a big oval in here but that's okay. We can do another layer of that and see what we can get. I've obviously got paint on my fingers so I'm getting paint on the back of these, but that's okay. Oh yeah. I love what this is doing right over here. Let's do this with the really get it off of there with her. Yeah, I see. We've pushed some of that back there. Let's see, what else do we got here? Might come back with some of this orange. Orange is actually rosy, but it's an orange-y shade, I like that. Go back to that first one. Oh yeah, that's what I wanted. Let's see if we can get that to push that back on this one. Oh yeah. So what I'm going to do is continue to paint, push, and pull the color back-and-forth and then speed this up because I wanted to talk about a couple of specific things in this particular video, stencils. Don't carve into your jelly plate. Look at that. Okay, I'm loving this. So I might put some scratches into this while it's wet. So very specific things I wanted to talk about. Don't dig into your jelly plate. Maybe consider some mark-making. A little bit of stencil work is fun. I'm going to go ahead and push and pull these until I'm thinking, okay, I'm there. So I'm going to speed this up and we'll see where I end up. One more thing too, don't be afraid to just pull paint from part of that plate. You don't have to pull the entire plate the whole time, so just a little bit on one side will give us some pretty cool texture. So I wanted to tell you, don't forget, pull from certain spots, just experiment with the whole plate and then certain spots. Then see what you get on your junk piece. So still working with that same junk piece because all three of these are turning into beautiful pieces of art. I'm going to continue to push and pull and I'll be back. Let's talk about this too. This right here is burnt umber acrylic ink and so I actually don't love using acrylic ink on the jelly plate. Because it just does not do very well as far as it bubbles up, but if there's some other paint on your piece, it can add some other different. We could maybe do some mark-making with the ink, but not necessarily. So let's experiment with a little bit of the ink spread around on our piece but not spread completely out and see what kind of additional mark-making that would give us. See, now, I just don't love that. That's what I'm not loving with the ink but I wanted to bring it up and recommend. You could play with ink in your piece if you wanted but it looks more like ink splats. I don't love that. I'm going to go over that now with something else. So if you try something, and I wanted to talk about doing something like that because we didn't really mention it and the heavy bodied acrylic paints, not a good choice either. Where is my towel that I clean up paint with? Let's just get another one. I'm getting this from myself. There's too much paint going on. Anyway, the very heavy bodied acrylics don't work very well and the very liquid-y acrylics, not my favorite. I really want you to experiment with the fluid acrylic and the medium bodied and stick with those. All right, not good. If you're going to use acrylic ink, you could do it on the very last layer after you're done. Do some mark-making with the ink like I like to do with some of the things that I create but it's not going to be a good layer on your plate itself. [MUSIC] 10. Finishing Touches: [MUSIC] Now, I've just put some brown and some black over here on my palette, some of this burnt umber and this lamp black. I'm just going to come back in here and add some dark mark-making and see what I can do here. I don't like all the black here on that piece right there so I might come back with my little rubbery brush and take that back a little bit with that with some color on the brush, spreading that to look a bit more like a mark. I might, at this point, to decide to add in some other marks so that doesn't look like it was all on its own. [LAUGHTER] I like that right there. Let's come back with some little roller marks and just see. Now I'm just, at the end, playing, thinking, what do I want this to do? I started playing on this one and realized I wasn't filming. [LAUGHTER] This one's maybe more my favorite. But what I wanted to talk about was add in some little dark marks on the edges if you want. Then maybe you consider coming back with our ink at this point and adding in some marks and some additional finishing elements at the top at the very end. Oh, and I see now I like that. I was starting to not like that with those extra marks, but now, with the acrylic on it, I'm definitely loving this. That's how I'm going to finish these. I want them to have just some extra interest on the top. I love that. We're going to have to let that one dry before we can do anything else. Then I will let this one dry. Here's our third piece, which I'm really loving this one here. [NOISE] I'm going to try to add some darkness in just a little bit maybe here on the edges. I like that little bit of when we can get some contrast showing in there. [NOISE] I like that. I don't want to go any further. Let's go ahead with our ink. Maybe I'm going to add some mark-making here with our ink. Look at that. I love this one. Now I'm glad I did another colorway for us. So the ink is definitely not dry, but I want to see what these finish up as. As carefully as I possibly can, I'm going to peel the tape so we can see what we've ended up with because that is what truly finishes it off. Seeing the clean edges, look at this, might be a new favorite. Look how beautiful how that is. Oh my goodness, this one is beautiful. Let's do this next one. The other thing I like about a series is, let's say, you think one is amazing and you think two are okay, but as a series, they're amazing because it is so dynamic to see three of a kind together. I am in love with this one and that you'll remember is the one I told you, you might not like it all but I am loving it both ways. I love that. Let's get our third one over here. Let's set this to the side for a second. Pull our tape. This one was so worth doing. [LAUGHTER] Now I got the blue set that I've done in the past. That's my very favorite. Now I have this set. Don't stick your finger in the paint. Be careful sticking your finger in the paint. There we go. We'll just let that do its thing and dry. Don't touch it again. I got to tell myself don't touch. [LAUGHTER] Look at that. Which way? I like it better that way. Yes. There we go, that way. Piece Number 3. [LAUGHTER] Look how beautiful these are. In this second collection, we talked about putting our paint on, doing strategic areas on our Gelli Plate rather than the whole plate, maybe tossing in a stencil. But again, I'd be really careful on your stencils that you select if you do that because my goal was to not be so crafty and maybe be a little more elevated for some beautiful finished, fine art abstract pieces. I would not have wanted to do stencils that had flowers on it, for instance, unless that really fit in with the theme I was creating. Be careful with the stencils. I like grungy stencils, shapes stencils for like a dot. You might consider some of those, but definitely keep in mind the tone of what you're trying to create with the stencils that you use because it's going to take it towards a crafty side or an elevated, more upgraded side depending on what you're picking there. Then don't scratch into your Gelli Plate with a sharp object, scratch on your paint piece itself if you want to scratch paint, and then finish off possibly with some other tools that you particularly like. I particularly like my acrylic ink. If I'm using the ink on something like this, I want it to generally be the top layer, because putting it on like Gelli Plate just makes big splotchy areas. I wanted you to see that, which is why I did that on one of these. But you'll notice, even though I did something that I'm like, oh, I don't like that at all in the middle of this piece, by the end, I was able to layer enough things on top of it where you don't even know that you did that. If you're doing your pieces and you're like, oh, it's looking terrible, I'm not liking it, I'm just not loving any of these, that just means you don't have enough layers on there. Let that paint dry and layer some more paint on top of it. Then there are a few that I finally just gave up on and I'm like, no, I don't like these, and I took them to the side, but that doesn't mean that they're junk. If I throw it to the side, I'm not throwing it away. I'm now considering other uses for that particular one and I'm just tired of working on it. Maybe I'm going to tear it up into its own piece of art. Maybe I'm going to use it for some collage papers later. I'm going to stick it in my collage basket of papers. Lots of different things I can do with the Gelli Plate, ones that I just give up on. But one or two of these I might have gave up on in the middle of the process, but I kept adding layers and certain spots of layers. I want you to definitely play with just doing a certain place and peeling it rather than the whole thing because these are amazing. Now that I'm done, I love them. I hope you have fun with this project and I'll see you back in class. [MUSIC] 11. Creating Bold Abstracts: For this project, I am going to make some very helpfully dramatic abstracts. [LAUGHTER] We'll see hopefully because sometimes what you have in your mind works out and sometimes it doesn't, so we'll see how this works out. I have just taken some of that mixed media paper and taped it up with my tape already, just to have it ready to start pressing down my designs and I have decided, like I talked about in that first project, that I like the edges to be clean and the artwork to be defined with the prints that we pull. But you can certainly leave the tape off if you don't want to use those. I have a clean jelly plate that we cleaned off and I'm going to use some wax paper. This is heavyweight premium dry wax papers. It's a deli paper that I basically got at one of the big box stores, Sam's, and I want to use these sheets as, [NOISE] they resist like to keep paint off certain areas so I can put paint, do a pool. Maybe I'll move this around and put paint, and do a different pool and I want to use these as just pieces that can keep paint off of different areas of the painting as I'm going. I like the wax paper because it's not easy to tear. It's not going to immediately soak up paint and tear on me like a regular piece of paper would. It resists the paint really nicely and I'm just going to have some of these handy for whatever idea I happen to come up with. The first idea I'm thinking is I want to make a dramatic landscape where we've got one color up here and a different color down here. Maybe we have some mark-making, maybe we have a splash of a third color. I don't want so much going on that it's distracting, but I want it to be a dramatic statement piece. So let's just see what we can create. This is completely different than the earlier pieces that we did, because the earlier pieces, just as an example piece I've done before, we were doing whole colors basically on the whole piece or I was putting some color in the piece and different areas. This piece, I want to be more dramatic. I want it to be big blocks of color and the statement to be made by those blocks. We could start the base off as a different color if I wanted some other color shining through all of the colors. So I'm feeling like I want a really dramatic maybe black and cream, and do I want some other color coming through the black and cream like maybe yellow oxide? I really like yellow. I really like orange. I do like to do more than one at a time. Let's go ahead and actually cover the whole thing in one color and then come back. Let those dry a little bit. I do want these to dry in between the layers. I'm going to go ahead and do a full pool. Look at that. Not quite on there. That's okay. Let's go ahead and do a second one. We can change this up as we're going but let's do a second one. I'm off the same amount. That's okay. Look how pretty that is. Then I do have just my random trash piece just to get any extra paint off, so there we go. Now, I think I want to go ahead and do a block off so let's just use the paper to block off our piece. Doesn't have to be exact, but it's hopefully going to be close. Then I think I want a dark top and a light bottom. So maybe if we go with a brown, let's see. Like maybe this brown. Just going to put like a little up here and then try to see what we can get. Maybe I'll use the littler brayer for that. [LAUGHTER] I'm just letting that wax paper be the area that we're going to pull off so these might not be dry enough, but let's just start layering in here so I'm going to pick the wax paper up. I'm going to try a little harder to get centered. Oh, yeah, that's pretty cool. Look at that. Doesn't have to be exact. I'm just experimenting here. I might go ahead and put this back on there. If you've got ways that you want to do this, there are a little more exact than I'm doing it and you know, definitely go for it. It's all about experimenting. Look at that. This should be a little different because we've got that. I did leave it with the paper on there, but [LAUGHTER] kind of a cool look that, that did. Look at that. I like that to actually right under there. I left the paper accidentally, but that was interesting the way that did that. Maybe I want to do a little bit more of this black on here. I do like that. Much heavier dramatic look. Pick that up. Yeah, super cool. Look at that. Let's go ahead. Let's go ahead and do this other southern bit. Let's just do that right there and I think I'm going to use my fluid paint just because I have so much of it. I don't have a large cream. I have that smaller cream, so I'm going to save some of that. Let's go ahead and take that. Well, I'm going to flip this over. I actually want to have this protected so let's just go ahead with a clean one. I don't think I got paint on it, but if I did, there we go. I'm being real careful not to squish the paper back and forth. I want the paper down. I don't want to pull the print. Oh, look at that. [NOISE] That's what I was thinking. [LAUGHTER] We could actually pull this off. Let's put some more paint on here and then I could decide where to put that wax paper. I could do that and then the top of the wax paper is clean. That probably would've been a better way to go. Now we can decide where we want this wax paper, so let's put it right there. Then let's go ahead. It's further down than I was thinking it was. Okay, hang on. See, still pretty cool though. Look at that. Super cool. You know what we could do too is we could use the wax paper to pull our print too if I needed to. Like this could be my my jump pool. Wanted to just clean this off. That would be a great scrapbook, not scrapbook collage paper. Now that we've got this on deli paper, it would be a really great collage papers, so we could set that to the side and save it. See, I think I want the black on this one to be heavier than I've got it. Let's see if we can go ahead and maybe do a little more on this one and this is just like the other set. I'm just working back-and-forth, thinking, what do I want out of this? I'm going to work fairly quickly. Got plenty of deli paper over here. Let's go ahead and put that down. Oh yeah, that's cool. Look at that. There was something else up in there. Super cool. Let's go ahead. Because the original one that I pulled, [NOISE] I just want that to be even heavier. Oh, that's super cool. [NOISE] I do have some paint on my thing down here that I don't want to pull off in the next pull but I do want some thicker. [NOISE] Cover all the brayer over here. It's clean. Always keep one completely clean. [NOISE] Oh, that's cool. Now I'm wondering if we take this and maybe get a dramatic color in the middle. [NOISE] Let's go ahead and clean off some of this. What if we do something dramatic here on this one? Maybe something like this sienna. Just to see. We could just take some of this. [NOISE] Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to actually paint this on. That was a lot of paint. Then I could take a couple of sheets of this, place it where I want it and we're just going to pull that one area. I'm just trying to judge where that stripe is going to fall. Oh, look at that. I'm loving that right there. I'm feeling like I don't want to do anything else to this one. Let's do something to this other one. Just pull the paint off of here. Actually really loving what's going on with this other piece. I just got to paint everywhere. [LAUGHTER] It's really nice if you're working on say a great big piece or a great big table so that you can swap back and forth between all your stuff. That would work really nicely. If you've got more space than my little filming table, a great big table to move back and forth, that would be super fun. I'm feeling light. Let's take a look at this. Let's think, what do we want to have as an extra element on here? I like the yellow. I like the black. You know what? How about some crazy like pink? I love pink and ocher. Let's just try pink and ocher. Let's get some of this [NOISE] color off of here. It's going to still be on my plate. I could have cleaned my plate off if this were something super dramatic that I was wanting but let's just do it like we got it. I'm going to take some paper. We could save some paper by tearing some of these. [NOISE] Let's see what we get there. Maybe if we offset it so I have a little bit of yellow on one side, that might be fun. Let's do that. Oh, look at that. [LAUGHTER] Look at that. I'm feeling that. I like these two. Let's go ahead. I'm going to clean my little jelly plate a little bit here and then we can then do another one. I want it to get that paint off of there real quick. Before we do that, I got lots of paint on the brayers. I want to look at pieces but I don't want to leave all this paint just drying on my brayer, if I can avoid it. [NOISE] Keep some of these little things handy so that you can wipe them off but I want to look at these without the tape and see really getting what I want to get. Don't be afraid to stop and evaluate, see what you're getting, make changes, go different directions, but I'm not doing this. Look at that. When you peel the tape, it instantly turns into that yummy dramatic piece of art that I was hoping for. I will say on this one, I almost wish that this were a little more solid. I may go back and revisit that with my silicone brush but then again, I like it, so you know what? We're going to go with that. I like it. I'm loving this one too. You pull that tape and then you get these defined edges, super cool. Look at that. Super fun. I like that this is angle instead of straight. I liked that this has the yellow peeking out of it. Very fun. [MUSIC] 12. More Bold Abstracts: All right. Let's do something with some different. I've got my dirty Gelli plate, which I can keep using, or I'll clean it off, or I start with a clean Gelli plate. I have several Gelli plates. It might be fun just to start on a new clean Gelli plate and see what it is that we want to create for our next piece, I'm going to go ahead and do a clean piece of paper. I want to have maybe three-quarters and something bigger here and then on the third one, maybe a third, and then a third. There's several different things that we can play with here. We could do the color on the whole thing and then come back and do separate colors. We could actually do the color on the whole thing with the dirty plate and then come back and do the clean plate. I really love the creams. I really am feeling, what am I feeling? Let's go ahead and just do a whole plate with the cream, and then I'm going to come back with some on top of that. That will give me a starter color. Not doing very good about getting these on the plate where they need to be. Let's try a little harder here. There we go. Also wonder too. Go ahead and do another one. I got a bunch of them over here because I want to do several. Let's go and say I also wonder too if we put the plate down on top of the print if that would work out because if I don't have the white paper on the back, we can see better where we were. Look at that. Oh, I might leave this and do some heavy color blocking. Let's do one more because that's cleaning off my plate really well. I was wondering, you might try and experiment, but if we do it this way, and we don't have the white paper on it, we could see exactly where we were setting this down. You could try that. I don't see why that wouldn't work okay because we could see that from the backside, but I've got the white backing on it but see now I love this. Now I'm feeling like a stripe of one of these colors that I just pulled out of there would be really nice. That definitely helped me focus on a direction like maybe we want red oxide and light pink. Why not? Let's put the Gelli plate back over here. We'll put that right there. It's pretty neat. I love how dramatic this one is. This is more what I was thinking with this. I might go back on this one. Do that again because I had to pause and I started coughing. I think the ink started to dry. Let's see if we can get this a tiny bit more dramatic. Still like this one better, but definitely super cool. Then we might just see what we can do here with a different color so let's see what we got here. What would be really cool is to maybe have a line or a shape or a stripe or something in a place that maybe we weren't exactly expecting. Let's get some pink on here. Then let's see about this here. Might not be dry enough. Let's do this one first and I'll let that one dry some more. Paints thinner on this one. Look at that. That's really cool. Now I think before I move on to something else, I'm actually just going to take some of this paint and even this out. There's nothing saying that we can't touch this up if we want so let me just take some of this pink paint. I want it thicker and smoother. Hope I've got some of that other color on my brush here. I think I'm going to let this dry, and then we'll come back and add this thicker and smoother on that one, and I like that. I want that pink thing to be solid. Let's go ahead and pull this paint off of here. I'm cleaning my brayer off here on the other side. Look at that. That's looking pretty cool there. I'm thinking I like that pink line. Maybe this one has dried enough now that we can get a better print on this one. Let's just do it all the way down that line. Well, let's see. I like it right there. I love that right there. I love that. That one might be a favorite. Let's get this paint off of here. Might go back to this one now that we've let that sit for a second, I know it wasn't very long, but I think it was long enough because these are thin layers. Acrylic paint dries fast, so I just want this box to be thicker on this side. More solid. There we go. That's what I want. Look at those. I like that. Let's pull our tape. I had a clean plate over there, and I ended up not using it. Let's pull your tape off. I do like having more than one Gelli plate though, if I'm doing a project, and I'm going to need to do a lot of different color changes and I want to be able to have a clean plate without cleaning it every time. They are very convenient just to have more than one while you're working on a project like this. That's super cool. I like it. I even liked the variations in the background paint. I'm very happy with that one. This one, I'm loving the way that pink stripe landed on top of there. Look at that. Oh, look at that another colorway, super fun, a very dramatic dynamic. Here's our other two that we did. Super fun. I'm loving those. Almost wish the pink were a little heavier on this one some may go back and color that in a little heavier, but I still do love it just like it is, super fun. I want you to give this a little try-out. I want you to take your Gelli plate with big swashes of solid color, a stripe, a line, a square. Some type of dramatic element that you've used your deli paper to close off parts of the plate to then just get your particular element that you're creating on your pole. I really like this one with this pink stripe on there. I'm also thinking on these rule of thirds, so third, a third, a third, a third, a third, a third, so when I was thinking, which third do I want my element to be at, on these two, it was on the top third, but really, we could say, that's even better flipped over. We'll say top third, this one bottom third, I want a big two-thirds of some color and then a little splash off some element. Love that. On this, I was thinking, the third being one side, center could be where element overlaps, and then one side with a solid color, and again, if we flip that, nicer because I like this show through pieces being on the bottom. So just think a third and two-thirds and then element in-between that and see what you can come up with. I hope you like playing in this technique where you're masking off some of the Gelli plate with some type of deli paper to create your dynamic elements. All right. I'll see you back in class. 13. Cutting Stencils From Yupo Paper: [MUSIC] On this project, I want to show you one other technique that would be really fun to experiment with. I'm using some YUPO paper because it's basically plastic. What I like about it is I can cut shapes and a design out of it and paint on it, without it getting soggy and tearing and stuff like that on me. Say for instance, I'm just going to take a pencil and draw my shape out here. Don't have to be exact. This is the 74 pound YUPO paper. I like it because it's not so thick, that it'll keep us from getting a good print. This is about the shape of the gelli plate. What I'm going to do, got an exact dough knife here. Let's get a cutting mat. You don't want to be cutting anything on your gelli plate. You'll cut your plate, but we're on a cutting mat. I want to draw some type of organic shape and let this be my stencil that I'm cutting, that I'm going to be creating on some of these pieces of paper. We could draw the shape out if we wanted, or I could just be real organic about it and see what I end up with. There we go. Now I've got a stencil to start with, and I've got some scissors somewhere, but they're hiding from me. Let's just cut this out out, with my exact dough knife. I didn't do that very well but now I've got a stencil that I can use. It's plasticky. It's not going to tear or get soggy when I'm adding paint to stuff. I also like this shape of what we just cut out. I might keep that. That's a fun little shape. I could also take one of these and cut some shapes out of it. I'm trying to just make sure I'll leave myself enough room that I'm not ripping this when I go to do something else with it. Maybe I'll do another shape in here. Maybe even over here we could do like a circle within a circle, maybe. Let's just think here. I could do this. Here we go. That's what I want to do. Let's do this. Let's cut out this. Now we actually could use that as a resist. We've got different things to use as a resist. Let's go with some of these. We could also, here we go. I got this. I could do something with. I like this last second on the fly. Just cut and see what you get kind of thing with your knife rather than being so precise and drawing it out and cutting an exact shape, but you can certainly do either way. I did that. I think another circle out of this circle would be cool, but I like the organic spontaneity of just cutting these out of these to see what we get. There we go. Let's do that. [LAUGHTER] I like it. Let's get rid of our cutting mat. Got a gelli plate stuck to the bottom. There we go. Now, we have stencils to play with. [LAUGHTER] I've got some paint on my gelli plate already. I might, just to test this out. Let's do this with the black. Put these where I can find them. I tend to lose things. [LAUGHTER] Start hiding stuff for myself. Let's put these right up here. I still have paint on the gelli plate. I'm okay with that. I'm basically going to paint inside the stencil, and then do a poll. What I like about this is then we're going to get the shape of the stencil. Something really interesting and unique. Got a couple of pieces of paper here that I did not tape up because I thought we could just see what we get. Now, see how I can just move that, and have a shape. I may be pulling the shape of the paint that's on there already, but hopefully that's dry enough. I could have started with the clean plate. I probably should have. Look at that though. I think we want to do is put this plate to the side because I do actually have a clean plate, and then I'm going to pull another one of those without the extra color. There's my scissors right there. [LAUGHTER] See how I hide stuff from myself. Then let's do a clean pull. Remove my stencil, see how nice that is and that paint just dries so fast. Look at that. I wanted to do a ghost pull, but there's not enough left on it. It's because I've pulled it from a clean plate. Clean plate everything comes right off of it. Dirty plates, plates you've been using forever, all kinds of stuff sticks to it. See, I love that one there. Three dramatically different starts. Look at that. I'm loving all of those. Now I don't want this one for the moment. I'm going to set it to the side, and I'm thinking I want to pull some shapes out of my stencil, and maybe I want to do those with a different color. I could also fill in like, do I really want to do with that? Let's see. Let's do a blue. What you might consider here is using our silicone brushes to get that paint in the stencil if that would be easier. I think I've got dried paint on my brush so I'm not getting a nice even, that's good enough right there. Pull our stencil. [LAUGHTER] Look at that. Then this is an instance where I've got clear on it. We could, I'm thinking, do this and see where it is. If you leave the clear backing on it it might be an option for you to then be able to see where you're putting that on your piece or you could just free go, just like that. Just see what you get. I love that one. I like that. We could also come back in here now with something like this and I don't know, maybe the green gold. Let's just see. [NOISE] That's not exactly perfect. I didn't get it all out though. Then we could see like where's that going to go? Let's see. Maybe I'll flip it over and judge. It's fun to just go for it too though to see what we get. My clean brayer. Look at that. The green gold wasn't very strong but it sure did make an interesting color on that. I did like it though. Let's see. Maybe if we did. What if we do this cream? That is the titanium white. Let's just go for it right there. [LAUGHTER] Just commit. [LAUGHTER] Look at that one. Except I have dirty fingers. Look at that. I put fingerprints on that. [LAUGHTER] Get the paint off my fingers here. I really like that cream and that blue dot and because I just put paint all over that, let's do another one. I've got this third one that I pulled and I can keep on making and pulling prints using different shapes, different colors. I should just go for it because this I could do 100 of these. I love random pieces. I like that. Let's go back with a blue circle. Paint on that one too but that's not for my finger. I must have paint on the gelli plate that's doing that. If you have paint anywhere else on the gelli plate that you're afraid it's going to get on your design. You could go ahead and use your wax papers again and [NOISE] close off any area that you are not doing the print from and that will keep your print clean from random marks, something like that. Then we can come in here with our print, pull that color. Look at that. Super cool. [LAUGHTER] Now, feeling like something right down the middle of that would be cool. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do a pull with my print here that I'm doing bridges trash pulls just to get rid of paint. Look at that. [LAUGHTER] Still got paint on there but that's all right. There we go. Then I know it's clean when I'm not pulling any more paint off of it. These stencils are super cool. You can use these over and over again once you get some that you like. What if I do something crazy, like this green gold? [LAUGHTER] That's the whole height of the paper. Don't think I want the whole height of the paper. Maybe I'll go ahead and just cover these. Well, probably would have helped if I hadn't used that right there, wouldn't it? Let's try that right there. That's crazy. These are super fun. Think I want to try these on a different colorway. I really do love this and this, and this, but maybe we can try some different colors. Maybe something lighter than the black. It's just very interesting to see if you do different shapes maybe an odd ball shaped start with what we can come up with. I really love these. [MUSIC] 14. Trying A Different Colorway: I grabbed a few more pieces of paper. Still using that same mixed media paper but what if we start off with say this pink, I've got other colors on my thing here I know that, but that's okay. Let that be a dirty poll. [NOISE] I like that let's try a different color as the base, maybe raw sienna. This will have some other color in it because the pink is still on my paper, my paper on my plate and my roller here. I think it'll be interesting to pick up my stencil. I just love the freaking stencils and how easy they are to create with YUPO paper. Keep that in mind too if you ever want to create some of your own stencils, YUPO paper, great choice. Love that one with the pink and the orange mixed. Though, unlike these colors, are definitely my colors. Let's try this third one. What color do we want to try? Don't want to do those, what do we got up here? We'll try this fun. Bluey gray. This is light blue, violet. Blue and orange are fun so I do like blue and orange mixed together so let's just see what we get. What I like about using, especially like one big main shape. Look at that, we can create then a whole series with different shapes and different lines and different things going on to do our different prints. What if we did this and then? Did a couple of these in here. Like that, look at that. Maybe we can even do this piece here, so don't throw out any of these. We've got a pink one here so maybe if we did, I really like, how about we try out this Pompeiian red. That looks very bright. [LAUGHTER] [NOISE] Remove some of this over, [NOISE] get all the paint off that little one. Let's put some of the Pompeiian read on our palette paper [NOISE] and roll over our stencil from our palette paper see, might be easier on this. [NOISE] Then very quickly pull your stencils up. I love it. Then I might go ahead and flip this so I can judge it correctly. Mostly want it to be right on it, got my clean one. Are my fingers clean? I hope so [NOISE]. Look at that. That's pretty darn cool. I do love that. Now, let's come back and put this one back about right there. Can move where we've put our little shapes. Don't be touching the stuff with wet paint. Fussing at myself now. It's actually nice if I cut these off, there we go. What if I did one of these here? I like this thing, right there. Let's see here so we've got the pink. Maybe the lighter pink to pull the pink off of what we already got going on there. It's also going to be a little different because we've got this bright pink on here. Let's just put some of this on here [NOISE]. We're just going crazy here, aren't we? Once you've got it where you want it pull your stencils off. Love it, let's try this on top of here. That wind-up got my clean Breyer. Just breyer that down. Look at that. This one. I like it. Let's do a ghost pull on this blue one, why not? Let's just go crazy. Yes, super cool look at that. Now I need one more element I'm really loving these, I need one more element. Let's just see, what can we do here. Let's bring our shape back I want to work in the shape. Then maybe we would come off this way. Maybe just some shapes in there. Maybe orange let's go back with the sienna, what do you think? Let's just try it. Let's see, you know what I think I might do with the orange. Maybe we could do that one on this one and just see what we get. Let's pull off our stencils. Shoot. That one's right, there we go. Let's get the paint off my fingers. Shoot, paints on my fingers, shoot. Breyer, it let's see what we got here. See now I love that I'm going to show you what I'm going to do because I got paint on my fingers but it's far enough out where I could do deck old edges around this piece and cut that right off and you wouldn't even know that I had a spot on there I didn't like, but I love that enough that I want to keep that. Let's do it goes pull on this blue one. See if you leave that clear on the bottom how you can really judge where that's going to be. Super cool. I really feel like this needs something more dramatic though. It's almost all the same color and that was not dramatic enough. Let's get more dramatic. Got this on here. What do you think if we try quinacridone magenta? It's like a good burst of color, it's darker than some of the other ones that we've tried. Well the only thing about that is I don't like this straight edge, so let's do like that, I like that. Then also I'm liking this, what if we do this? We have that line right there in the middle of that. I'm filling that. Let's go ahead and get some paint out here. Feeling good about this [NOISE]. Feeling good about magenta. Let's see what we got. It's pull our stencils off, you see how great this YUPO paper is, it's insanely great. I actually want to do it on this one and we'll use that blue and as our pole piece. I'm filling it on this. This will give me my drama hopefully on this piece. [LAUGHTER] We're going to be used to. These are more exciting to me than the black. I'm just not a black grungy person. I try to be I'm trying to be the black grungy person, paint person that artists like to be, but. That's what that needed. I love that. Because we have my fingerprints on one of these that I didn't intend let's move some of this out of the way and I'll wipe the paint off my fingers but we want to keep all our stencils. We're going to just put the stencils on something to dry and set these to the side because you want to be able to continue using your little stencils that you cut out because if you really love it like I really love how these turn out on these abstracts, I want you to be able to keep using them and that YUPO paper doesn't go bad. It's just nice thick plastic key paper that you can keep using. [MUSIC] 15. Creating Deckled Edges: Okay, so I've got everything moved and I want to show you a trick on these that we can do. If we get paint off the edge of something and we still love it, we still want to maybe use it and frame it. One of my favorite things to show in the workshops is a float frame piece. This is a piece I have hanging on the wall up here and it's floating and hanging and it's got these deckled edges. This would be the perfect type piece to induce some deckled edges. If I got paint off to the side and I still wanted it to be like salvaging it and maybe selling it and using it and framing it or whatever. I want to be able to still use this piece. I would come back with either a ruler or rip ruler. I have rip ruler that came from dualedgeripper.com, which is a Dual Edge Ripper. I like this because it has such a beautiful natural deckled to it that's a little different than the deckle, that I get from just a regular ruler. I can see that I'm really wanting to trim about this much, but I don't want to trim it on the top side because I want that deckled to look like it's just flowing over the paper. I want to deckled it from this side. There's a couple of ways you could do that. You can look at the edge and say, okay, I need to come in, however much space this is with a ruler. One-and-a-half centimeters would be perfect, to get past that edge there. If I flip it over, I could then figure out what one-and-a-half centimeters was. I could set my ruler up there and I'm ready to tear at that edge. You need enough here to tear or it's just really hard and I'm tearing up towards the ruler to get it that nice finished edge. Well, you can use a regular ruler to do that too it's just has less of this variation there. But now you can see we've tore off that edge that I did not like. Now I need to know that I've got about a centimeter. It's all even about a centimeter over. For here that would be like one and a quarter centimeters. Let's do one and a quarter right there. Now I want to make sure that I have about the same amount of paper all around. I could tear from the top edge, but what I don't like about that, is that you have a line where the ruler was. If I'm tearing from that side, there's a line right here whereas I flip it over, It's not a line there. It's real smooth and you can see I didn't tear it completely even, but it's even enough. That's enough, it's enough to make me happy. You could just play around with what's going to work out for you here. This out really only do on these if I just tore off a mistake basically where paint got on it or I didn't want it on it. Here I'm just trying to tear off a little tiny amount. Just grab the edge and do the best you can on something like that. Because the more edge there, the easier that is, there we go. Then because it's not even shaped anyway and it's tilting up I'm okay with that tear on that. But I could have tore from the top. It just is a different look on the edge. If you do make a mistake and you get a fingerprint or something where you didn't intend it that's how I would fix that, I would turn this into a deckled edge piece and I would tear the edges. Just to show you the difference of what it would look like, just using saying a regular ruler. I'm going to use my marketer because it's easier for me to see and we'll tear it up instead of down. I could judge pretty easily like where I wanted these because the ruler is clear and then I get all the edges lined up and I would just tear that just like that. Then you're going to see a line where that's tore but it's still is okay. But you can definitely see all your edges easier. You could judge how even you get it better this way, because I can see where that artwork ends on each turn. See, super easy with a ruler also. Then we have that one also torn. We can have like a whole little series with deckled edges or if we were super careful, we can have the full thing with the regular edges. This one is super fun I'm extremely happy in this pink color way. I love this one right here. That's my particular favorite. I also love this one. This one I like, wouldn't say it's my favorite, but I still do like it quite a bit. I love this. I love the black, the grungy is just not my favorite. It is a nice finished piece and this, I had something on the edge here and so I'd probably tear the edges of these. But I like the colors that appeal to me better than starting with the black. That was a very interesting experiment. Just know if you do like a set that maybe you don't love to change up the colors to something that you're like, okay, I know I love these colors are here's something I have in mind or here's a colorway I wanted to try and see if you can surprise yourself with something that's amazing. I hope you love experimenting with YUPO stencils that you create yourself and the abstracts that you create with those and I'll see you back in class. 16. Experimenting With Scrapers: I thought we could do another small project so that I could show you another little trick here. We talked about not carving into your Gelli Plate a couple of times in the class but I want to really hone that point in. If you're wanting to make marks on the paint before you press your print, you don't want to use something sharp. You will mar and scar and ruin your Gelli Plate if you're using sharp stuff on the plate itself. You'll want to put paint on your paper and scrape the paint while it's wet. You've got to be fairly fast because the paint is so thin it dries very quickly. That's the only way that I would use anything sharp on my paint with a Gelli Plate on the print itself. Don't use it on the plate. That being said, you could use softer silicone things. If you've got the silicone brush, you could come in and make marks and drags and do different stuff. The Gelli Arts company has soft silicone pieces with different edges. I've got several different type scrapers like this but I like the Gelli ones because they're very, very soft. They're silicone, they're easy to use and you can just drag them through and get different marks and drags on your piece that way. You could use any of the Catalyst Wedges. If you've got some of the silicone wedges by Catalyst or anybody else that makes some that are soft, you could use those on the Gelli Plate. They've got some of those with cutouts on them. I would not use anything that's hard. I've got some of these that are very hard. If it's hard, I would use that on the print but not the plate. I don't want to damage my plate. I've also found some other little rubbery things I was just thinking about. These are silicone spatulas. I haven't had these in a couple of days because I saw them when I went to Michaels and these are soft silicone spatulas. We could use something like this on our Gelli Plate if we needed something with a finer comb on it. I like these, it looks like each end is just a duplicate of itself but these are nice. We could get some smaller marks. That's Recollections, It's a silicone spatula set and I just found that at the Michael this week. It's a fairly new thing in my little toolbox but I'm glad I have it. You could also make your own rubbery spatula kind of things because I've made these in the make your mark class where we were making different tools for mark-making and stuff. You could get some of the speed ball, speedy-curve rubber and you can just cut that rubbery block into your own spreader or scraper with different marks and teeth on it. That's another option if you really want to create something just all your own. Some different options of things that we could use to scrape on our plate. I have not cleaned the plate, it's still dirty from yesterday. I like that and I'm going to put cream on this and I'm going to use what I've been using as my trash page because I really love this side. If I'm all done and I love this so much that I want to use it, there's nothing saying that we can't frame that out with a piece of mat board and then you won't even notice that we had stuff outside our initial paint area. It can still be easily framed if we love what we did. I'm feeling like just seeing the mat around it. I'm in love with that piece right there. I almost don't want to do anything else to it. Decisions, decisions, I almost want to do this side and then if I don't love it but I'm at least showing you the example then I could still frame that side. I think that's what I'm going to do. Too funny. Let me get my scraper, my roller, because my clean one, I keep it clean. I don't want to get paint on it. I want it to be the clean one. I'm going to put some ivory on here. I don't even mind that I've got painted already on here. It'll pick up and be an extra element. I like that but I could have cleaned the plate off if I'd wanted to. Moving fast, we are just going to do some interesting lines and then right on top, I'm just going to use my clean brayer and get a good print and see what we get. Look at that. It's exactly what I wanted. Now, we could put a different color on here and I've got two others that are just random prints. What we could do is we could pick a color. Let's see, I got so many colors here. Do I like the blue? Let's just do blue. I'm just going to spread the blue on here and we'll just see what we get. We should even still have some of those markings on there but what we could do is come through with a different one. I really like this thing here, these little tiny ones. There we go. It probably would help if I had a towel ready to get some of this paint off because I don't want to let all the paint dry on these. There we go. Let's do this one or not. I've got my clean one, let's just get a good clean. Let's see what we got. Let's do this one because we got a lot of paint on there and see if we can get a better pool. Look at that, that's super fun. I actually have so much paint on there that I really want to get more of that off, so let's just take a clean one. There we go. That's pretty cool, look at that. I think that's my favorite, I can see the cream, I can see the blue, I can see the lines that was underneath, I can see the lines on top. We could actually say that is a pretty cool finished print if we wanted to say that's finished. I'm actually loving the third one. Again, apparently working in threes is my favorite way to go because on the third one, we get the most pull and the most interest. I might just save these for a later pull, for when I want to do something like this again because this is pretty cool. Look at that. If we go ahead and say, that's finished now I could frame that side if loved it. Super cool. I just wanted to give you another fun little option on your paint pulls and trying out some of the silicone scrapers and rubber silicone, different tools that are out there to pull a print. I like this one, so we're going to call that one a good one. I want to know what your paint pulls, where you've actually scraped through paint, what did you come up with? What are you scraping with and what piece did you love when you were done? I'll see you back in class. 17. Going Larger: [MUSIC] In this project, let's go bigger. I have got some nine by 12 pieces of our mixed media paper and I have the eight by 10 piece of jelly plate because it's about big enough to be able to film, I have a bigger one too but I'm going to play on this size today with this size of paper. Nine by 12 is quite a bit bigger than eight by 10 obviously and so I think what I'm going to do because I like clean edges. Look at that already have paint while I didn't intend to from those rubber paints [NOISE] I'm going to go ahead and tape off the edges as long as I didn't get any paint on the edge, I'm going to be covering it so it doesn't matter. I just get paint everywhere when I'm creating. I'm going to tape all the edges because whatever I do, I want to keep it within the square. I want to be able to peel the tape and it'd be clean when we're done [NOISE] because it's my favorite part [LAUGHTER] peeling the tape. I'm using the painter's tape for this because it's the one I have that's a little bit larger and I've got three pieces of paper. I like working in threes because I don't know that third ghost print seems to be my favorite out of the ones that I do. Let's have a three in case the third one is the magic charm [LAUGHTER] Third time is the charm. Then any that I don't love, again, we can just cut those up into other pieces of art which I love to do. I think that's my favorite way to create anyway, it takes off all the pressure so I could cut those up. I can create a little dot art. I could create some little arts. I could do any of those other yummy projects that I've done with the leftover part. I'm just bending the tape down and then I don't feel wasted so if I love all three of them, that's great. If I love one out of the three, I consider that a win. Now the thing with going larger, I have tried it where I'm just trying to go fast enough to get my print before the paint dries but really if you would use a little bit of retarder in your paint, it will give you a little more time if you've got some other special things that you want to be doing. If you want to be dragging through the paint with one of your silicone draggers, if you want to be using your stencils on the paint, which I have those right over here and ready. If I decide I want to use one of my Yupo stencils or if I want to cut some more Yupo paper up for this particular project [NOISE] I have all of those over here. It looks like I stacked on the paint a little bit wet. I did. Don't get that on anything [LAUGHTER] But now they're ready. Some of these are big enough to definitely use on my larger jelly plates so if I decide while I'm doing stuff to use my stencils, I can. Now the thing with the retarder, we're retarding the dry time of the paint so we may have to allow a little bit of dry time between layers, just consider that it's not going quite as fast. Maybe it's the smaller one because we're extending the dry time of our pieces. I'm going to put the paint probably on the pad here, mix it with the retarder with just, say, a spatula, and then I'll probably get it rolled and then roll it onto here, and then do my print, and then maybe do a ghost print, and then maybe add some more to our piece, and then you just got to decide, are you creating one of the many different types of projects that we did where we're doing the general abstract or are you're creating something where we're doing the bold, shapes and lines or did you want to do the stencil part where we're doing shapes and stuff with all the stencils. I really liked those. Are you doing a combination of all of that? We've got lots of techniques that we learned on all the different projects in class, now how are we going to create a big piece with some of that? I particularly love that there's dried paint on here that we could be pulling up and so I'm almost thinking if I do one with a cream layer because I do like how that pulls paint with the cream, then we could stack on top of that. Let's just try and see what we get. I'm actually going to use the medium body paint and you may have to use more paint than I've pulled out. You're using about two-thirds paint to one-third retarder. I'm excited to do this bigger project so that we could talk about the retarder so that if you have bigger ones that you're doing and you're like, paint's drying too fast, can't get nothing or smaller ones that you're doing and you're thinking, paint's drying too fast, I can't get nothing. The retarder is extending our paint time for us, that's how we're going to be getting that extra time. I'm just going to keep this over here and then let's go ahead and spread some of this on. I may need more paint than I've put out, but that's okay. I'd rather start off and build. I had plenty of time to get enough paint on here hopefully and then let's just go for it [NOISE] We got a nice pull. Still some paint on here, let's see if we can get a ghost pull, wanting it to pull some of what's on that. Play with it [NOISE] I keep knocking stuff off my table [LAUGHTER] I liked that ghost pull better. Let's see, I don't have enough paint left out here. Let's just start layering some stuff on. I really like pinks and oranges so maybe we'll just do this in some different pink, orange, yellow. Let's just see. Let's just pull all these out and see what we got. I love these colors and we've got the Naples. Let's do the Naples. This is the Naples yellow hue and this is cadmium red light hue, this is Quinacridone Magenta, and a light pink. Let's just see what we can get. You can mix colors on your palette here. You don't have to just do different layers in just one color. Consider that you could mix up more colors on the palette, you just got to think and get creative here with your paints and your abstracts and after you do a couple, then think, okay, now that I've done this, what can I change and how can I do it different? What can I get with the next pull? Let's just go ahead [NOISE] If you're doing two or three pieces, you might just do each piece, each layer different and see what you get as you're pulling each piece [NOISE] I'm not being real exact. I want these. They don't have to be perfect in the square. That's why I've got the tape. If I end up upper, little bit higher on one color and not the other, and I get these weird different edges, I'm looking for that. I want some of those differences or I could have taped it in tighter to make sure everything's in the square, but we can always frame it. However, we need it later, so I just don't worry about it. [NOISE] I love that right there. That one's looking good. I'm setting these to the side as I paint decide on the next color. Here's where maybe we will use some of our stencils. Could use our original stencil. I don't like that square edge in there though or maybe I do. Maybe I like that right there. Let's just do that. [LAUGHTER] Maybe will work in some. Let's start with the light pink. You can see how easy this is to mix with the retarder. I'm just getting it mixed in there. It's giving me plenty of time to work and get it rolled on my canvas. I'm not going to worry about the paint that's already on my roller, I'm just going to keep on adding. [NOISE] Then of course we have to pick our stencils up. They're going to be wet, so don't set them on anything important. [LAUGHTER] Just exactly what I end up doing setting them on things I didn't intend to. [LAUGHTER] Now, when I'm moving it, I'm not moving the paper. The paper is not squishing back-and-forth. The paper is on there, it's got a good adhesion and I'm just pushing it flat. Look at that. [LAUGHTER] That just got very exciting. Let's just do a ghost pull on this one. [NOISE] Yes, so barely visible on that one. We could go back with some more. Let's see. I could actually do like this way. I did like this enough on that to maybe do this. Let's see. Let's go for the yellow see what we get. A little bit of retarder. Do some mixing. You can see on my little print there the layers are so thin that I'm still getting [NOISE] a pretty fast dry time on my actual print over here. I'm able to keep coming back layer in these thin layers for a minute before I really need to let those dry to keep going. [NOISE] The retarder even though it's giving me a longer dry time here on my paper, still drying fairly fast. I think I want to go ahead. Let's just do that on this one. Let's flip it over. Let's do it this way. [NOISE] I'm filling these, look at that. [LAUGHTER] We will go ahead and do our ghost pull, split that over. [NOISE] Nice. Let's see. What do we want to do? Almost feeling like [NOISE] got a lot of paint over there. Let's come back with some orange. Working from one of our earlier tricks, we could do an orange stripe. [NOISE] Let's do an orange stripe. I'm doing a stripe and that's not so big and I've already got some paint on my brush. What about my brush? My roller. I think I can do this fast enough without the retarder. I'm not going to keep all the messy paint pages, but you can definitely keep those. If you get paint where you didn't intend, we might take a scraper and scrape that. Perfect for reining in extra spots that we didn't intend to do like that. Really I could have just done the whole thing. Look at that. [NOISE] Look at that. Let's do that on this lighter one. I want it right here. Look at that. I love it. I love it. Let's do this one. Get the rest of that. I'm feeling that stripe, definitely like in the stripe. Let's see. What else do we want to do here? We're just playing. Just seeing where we can go using up some paint here. [NOISE] I have a third piece of paper. I'm just trying not to waste the paint. [NOISE] Look at that. That one's really pretty. I might do these as a cut up piece of art when we're done. Since we all know that's my favorite way to create. I should have liked that. Let's think. [MUSIC] 18. Experimenting With Marks & Color: [MUSIC] I think I'm going to work a little faster. Just wanted to introduce you to the retarder more than anything but I would want, now that I'm looking at that, the one that we made earlier in class and the oranges that had the pretty ink left over bits, wanting something like that out of one of these pieces. Look at that. [LAUGHTER] I'm just going to spread some of this stuff on here and I might grab a fourth piece of paper. I have plenty of paper handy to do other ghost poles because the ghost poles all tend to be my favorite. [NOISE] Look at there. That's going to be our true trash piece of paper, which I'm sure when I'm done. We'll turn into some pretty piece of art. [LAUGHTER] This is really how my creative process goes. I've got something in my mind, I try some of it out. Maybe it's working, maybe it's not, maybe I do a little turn on myself. [NOISE] I love that. With the direction that I wanted to go, I wanted to introduce you to the retarder so you got a little bit of how that works that feel. But maybe right in the middle of that, if we're working fast enough or if you're not doing a piece that's so gigantic, maybe you don't need the retarder, but I just wanted you to know that was available. That's pretty, pretty. [NOISE] That's beautiful. [LAUGHTER] Let's see. What else do we want to add on that? I love that a lot. Maybe we'll come back in here around the edges a little bit. [NOISE] See what we get because on this one, I do have near the top edge, not really any paint. Super fun. Let's turn that over and do that again. There we go. Filling in to my edges here. Let's do with the trash piece. I'm telling you the trash pieces always end up being my favorite. [LAUGHTER] It's always the leftover paint that does the most interesting stuff. Super cool. Now I want something more vivid. [NOISE] Super cool. See now, if I did this as a cut-out piece of art, this right here is looking super interesting. Fun. I could come back to, once I get it to a point where it's really getting heavy on the paint and it's starting to create weird. [NOISE] I don't know, almost like divots and weird stuff. I could go ahead now and start pulling in some brighter marks like I did [NOISE] on those smaller pieces that I liked so much. I can see now that I've got all these little paints that this light pink is going to be a favorite. I don't have to buy all the colors big. I can just go buy the ones that I actually ended up loving and using. I know the light pink is going to be that color. At this point we can look at it and think, is there anything else I want to add to that? Do I love it? Do I hate it? Look at that, paint still wet, so we can drag stuff through it. Look at that, I just made that better. [LAUGHTER] I like that. Also, do we want to add marks with other stuff? Is the paint still wet to even do that? It's wet in some spots. Also, do we want to try out any acrylic ink to add any extra things to this? In the end, am I going to cut this up or am I going to love it just like it is? Lots of different things to think of here. I do love the Payne's gray, so that might be something that we could come in and do some marks with. Super fun. Now the thing with the ink, if you come through and do stuff with ink like that, you got to now set this to the side and let it dry. You can't really do anything else with it. I almost feel like that this could be a cut up piece [LAUGHTER] with different parts in here that maybe I loved, so we'll see. Let's set that to the side while that ink is on there and pull back these. I really love this one. I'm wondering, do I want to add anything else to it, or do I want to call this one good? Because just as it is, this is a beautiful piece and I know this is a little bit smaller mat, but we could frame that right there just like it is and I love it. I think I'm actually going to keep this one like it is. I'm going to say that one's done. I like having these little mats because then I can judge stuff. Let's see if we pull this off. [NOISE] Not every piece has to have a million layers. If you get to a layer that you're like, "Oh, I love this," you are welcome to give yourself permission to stop there. [LAUGHTER] Look at how gorgeous that is. [LAUGHTER] We're going to call this one good to go. I'm in love with that. Now, this one is very similar, but I don't love it as much. It could be because overall, it's darker. What I could do is do a cream layer maybe on top and then do some more dragging through the paint. Why don't we do that. Let's just give that a whirl. Oh, honey, the gelli plate. Hang on. [LAUGHTER] I moved the wrong thing. I'm going to go ahead and use the flow cream because I got it out. I'm going pretty fast, and we'll just hope I get enough before it dries. [NOISE] I could drag through right now, but I think I'm going to wait. [NOISE] If I'm more organized and have more space, I don't pile stuff on top of each other, so I keep the backs of my paper clean but in the end, what does it matter? Look at that. That totally changed what this is. Look at that. There's not enough to drag, but that totally change that whole piece. That's pretty cool. Now, I think because it did that, let's put some stencils back on there. I did like the stripe, so we could do some stencils in here with some stripes in there. Let's just do something like this. Maybe I want the retarder in there, so I have a minute to do that. I definitely need more paint on there. [NOISE] Sometimes art is just go on until you're like, "Oh, okay. This is it right here." Because all art has ugly stages, so we're trying to get through what we consider as ugly to get to the part that we're like, "Oh, this is amazing." [LAUGHTER] Let's pull that. We could go ahead and do some stripes through this. Let's see. Actually, let's just do the one-side stripe. Let's just see what we get here. [NOISE] Oh, sweet. Now, that's pretty cool. Maybe if we do maybe a big yellow line, let's do that. Let's do some yellow [NOISE] right through this orange. Here's another color that I know. I want a big one of. I want to like having all these little ones, [NOISE] you can test out colors and see what you like. When you love something, then go buy the big one. [NOISE] There's that. Now, I'm thinking we've got some retarder in there. I got a second. I want to have any lines in here. Let's just do a few right here. Then we can take this, clean up anything we got over there. Let's see what we get. I think I want the stripe come in right there, so let's flip that over right there. [NOISE] That's pretty cool. I think I wanted that down there though. [LAUGHTER] That one's pretty fun. Let's see. Maybe we can get this stripe here too. Let's see, [NOISE] [inaudible] pull. [NOISE] Look at that. That's super fun. Now, out of this whole section, let me get that right there. This one is definitely one I'll consider cutting up because out of this right here, I'm really liking that right there. Out of that right there, I could come back and do some ink on top of it as a little finishing touch if I wanted to. It doesn't have to be in Payne's gray. It can be in any color that I want to do it in, but I'm feeling like this one I might cut up. How do you like that? A lot. I'm going to stop right there for a second. Move my gelli plate. Let's pull the tape and see what we're actually looking at. If you pull tape and you think, really not done, you can definitely come back, put that tape back, and do it some more. I don't think I'm going to do that. I'm thinking I want to see that like it is. I'm feeling like I'm going to cut that to that right there. I'm loving this whole pink and yellow and stuff going on. I'm going to grab a couple of pieces of ink, I'll be right back. I decided to go ahead and cut this one just so we're again looking at other things that we can do. Then once I've done that, I'll get this piece right here. Amazing. Now, we can have some other unique pieces. [NOISE] We could finish this off and frame it as a print itself. Don't think that's straight, straighten that up some. I could've used my cutter, but I was already using the scissors. I could frame this out as its own unique piece of art or I could use it as a bookmark, which I might do because this might be my favorite piece today. This might be a piece I just save for some gift tags, maybe some heart cutouts, some collage papers. I'm going to put that one to the side. On this one, I'm going to finish it off with maybe some hot pink or I might come back with, what I could've done, I think I would like maybe some cream ink. [MUSIC] 19. Finishing Up & Marks with Inks: You know what's really interesting about the inks that I've noticed. I got a lot of ink than white, but they don't have ivory. Ma'am, I'm just loved this one right here. Might be my favorite piece right there. Do we want ivory as our mark? Or I could have got orange, but I also got this yummy hot pink. It's like, what do I want to make an extra mark or something on here? I can also use paint pens like my posca pens. That might be something, but let's just color it. Got air bubbles, which I didn't want. Sucking out these air bubbles. If you're shaking your ink because you need to to get the ink all spread around, you do run the risk of then having some air bubbles, which is fine, but I don't want that air bubble drawing in there like that. I'm just popping some of those. Look at that, I just did something that did a little sprinkle. Now I'm going to get a little paintbrush, that's what I feel like I need. Let's get a little brush. Let's get a little bit of water. Put a little ink on my palette paper over here. That's a lot of ink. I don't want to get that everywhere. Then, let's do some splatter. I do love some splatter. I think I'm going to let that one be done. Look how pretty that is. It adds an extra little ump, it's on my rule of thirds. I've got it separated third, third, third, and I've got a focal point on that top. Third side. Got a little splatter, got a lot of interest. That's really pretty. Then just for giggles, let's see what this would have been like if I had picked pink as an ink, for instance, let's just do it on our fun little bookmark. Look at that. We could do pink splatter. Little pink over here. I have a bad habit of dumping ink bottles over, so be careful and put your lids on. Now that I did that on the little one, I do like the excitement of the white on my big one. That's a really nice thing to do here with these little pieces, is to test out your ideas and say, Okay, am I going to like, say for instance that pink on there, or do I think that white would be better? If you've got these little pieces like this, that's the perfect time to try out your samples, or if you did like little sampler pieces and started playing with some color ways, you could have figured out, I like the pop over the white or I liked the pop of the pink. You could have made that decision. I'm going to set these to the side. That's super fun. Here is our original large piece, which now that we've been playing in the inks, we could look at this and say, okay, I love the ink on these littles, maybe a little bit of ink on this big one would be fun. I could go back and add some fun little ink details if I wanted. I need some of my little tools to move. I could come back on this and add some extra details, I really love it like it is though. I'm going to leave that one like it is. Here we go, using our big jelly plate, playing with all the different techniques that we have played with throughout the class and ending up with three really pretty pieces out of that. I do have my trash piece that's really pretty also. I could come back, add maybe a stripy thing to this and some more ink and I could make this into something too, or I could just keep it as my trash piece. We'll see. Then of course, this piece that still drying with the black on it. Got to move the wet stuff real quick. Let's just pull the tape. The ink is still wet so I'm not going to move it too much. Now this tape just as a side word, this tape, because this is cheaper paper, some of the tape is tearing the paper and if you have trouble with your tape tearing the paper, you can heat the tape up a little bit with your heat gun to release it better so you don't end up with torn paper on the sides if that's going to really drive you insane. But this is a really pretty piece and it's a piece that I might cut up depending on when it's dry, what I like. I might not cut it up though. I just like keeping my options open. These are really fun. I could cut it up and then add to it. That's pretty. Out of the different colors here that I've done with this, I think I like the white ink on the top, and that would have been a nice choice on top of this one. So super fun, experimenting with some extra marks on top and seeing how the different colors work on the different pieces. I want you to experiment here with this larger piece with all the different skills that we learned all through class and then just see what we can come up with. and if you create something that you really love, especially if you're inspired by a small piece that you're going larger with, definitely come back and share some of that with me. I'll see you next time. 20. Final Thoughts: I hope you enjoyed the different projects that we had in this class. Definitely, I had a lot of fun coming up with it. I loved showing you where my inspiration came from, from the cold wax abstract, paintings, and artists that I particularly love to follow. I hope you will start looking around at different abstract things, and instead of saying, "I don't think I could do that because I don't have a bunch of say, oil paints and cold wax, and all of that." Instead, think, "How can I recreate that with some of the supplies that I already have?" Because that's what I've done in this class. I have the oil and cold wax. I have done plenty of oil and cold wax paintings. Some of the things that I haven't taken as long and had as much patience as I probably needed to create the many layers and colors in the pieces that I love the most, and so then I started thinking, well, how can I do that with acrylic paint and maybe come away with looks that are just as beautiful. They draw a lot faster and maybe when I'm done painting for the day, I have something I really love rather than something two months from now. Some of the things that I create just came about because I'm thinking I love that, but how can I create it with what I have or with the time constraints that I have, or what could I create with these different elements? This is my inspiration. I hope you enjoy playing in the acrylic inks and your jelly plate, and maybe even look at your jelly plate a little differently than most of the things out there, because most of the things are very crafty looking. They're for collage papers and scrap booking and they're very kitschy, maybe very cutesy. I'm looking to possibly elevate the looks that I get off of my jelly plate into a finer abstract feel. I hope this class inspires you to create differently with the jelly plate if that's something that you've used quite a bit of. I have enjoyed having you here. I can't wait to see some of the things that you create. Definitely come back and share those with me. I'll see you next time.