e) Pour the water into the gelatin. Mix gently with a wooden spoon for about 5-10 minutes until gelatin dissolves. Keep mixing, and gradually and most of the little blobs of gelatin will dissolve.
If You Can Make Jell-O You Can Make a Gelatin Printing Plate
“Gelatin printmaking is a planographic process, which means one prints from a flat surface. It resembles traditional methods such a wood block, etching and lithography, in that one develops the image on a printing plate. Instead of copper, stone or wood, this method uses a plate made of gelatin. It is a beautifully simple non-toxic printing method which lends itself to the exploration of image-making with a great deal of freedom and invention.”
Janice Wright
Let’s do some gelatin printing!
There is something so ridiculously unique about making a handmade gelatin plate and printing an eclectic stack of papers. It’s fairly addictive for me — so I will make a plate, use it for the weekend — and have enough paper for months and months! Gelatin printing is perfect for making paper to use in mixed media collage, art journaling, junk journaling, and index card art. They also make groovy bookmarks. Printing is somehow energizing as cut + paste therapy but also calming and meditative at the same time? I completely lose track of time and space while I am making gel prints. It’s an act of creative flow. It starts with curiosity, wondering what on earth will happen, playing around with surface masks, doing experiments, testing different layering scenarios.
Why make a gelatin printing plate?
What could be cooler than starting from scratch and making the very surface for your printing experiments!? A real gelatin plate is moist and cold, folks — but you can’t tell from photographs! And that unique printing surface alters your printing results so they are not simply a replica of the paints you see on the plate. It’s like they have a mind of their own.
I like the characteristics of a DIY gel plate and the fact that I can make a plate in any size, just by changing the container. Karen of I am Rushmore compared the results and reading the post planted the idea of printing with the cheesecloth. Cheesecloth was in a bowl on the kitchen counter being dyed with espresso. right next to my stack of cardstock for printing. Sometimes I make a plate on a ginormous cookie sheet [the kind with the raised edges], which is this vast luxury of space — and makes it possible to do two prints at once – with the same color palette, for example! Or two variations simultaneously.
So my process is to make the printing plate, put it in the fridge to chill and firm up, then go collect things to use with the plate. Here are some items that can be used to add texture or marks or mask areas on the plate.
