The other night it was getting later in the evening and I had not gotten to any art stuff yet. I didn't have a lot of time to get a piece of art going, but I had seen a video in the prior couple of days where someone made their own stamp-type things to use on their gel press.
I had cut up some boxes to throw out earlier in the evening and several pieces were just laying there, so I decided to pull out my old glue gun and try my hand at it. I knew I didn't have a lot of time and so I wasn't trying to do extra-EXTRA great things with it, but just something I could try out. I made 5 or six, grabbed out my gel press and some papers and got it started.
This laughing face was my favorite. I liked some of the others, but because I was semi-hurrying, I didn't make a lot of them work as well as they should have. I was using thicker paint on my gel press and it was staying too wet and not pulling up the designs. I did play with it enough to kind of know how I would do it different next time.
When I pressed this first white one, there had be some vague bits of blue and other colors leftover on the press and I expected them to come up and make areas of it grungy "as they like to say", but I had on too much white paint and it stayed too wet or should I say I didn't wait long enough before pulling the paper back off.
The size of the stamp I made wasn't big enough to cover the whole gel press, so I took my chop stick that I use to make random marks with and put in some happy faces at the bottom too.
After the white pull, there was leftovers of that on the press, so I rolled magenta over the top of it, waited a little and then put a piece of paper on top. I rubbed it around, pulled it up and got this version. You can see a few bits of the blue that I thought would come up on the white one.
THEN there was white AND magenta grunge left on it, so I put blue on the top of it, waited, pressed, waited and pulled !... and this one actually pulled some of the previous grunge up.
So basically, in my quickie self-lesson, I actually learned a lot and the neat thing was that I could make something interesting at any time later.
Not only that, it kind of makes me smile every time I look at one of these.
As always, it was fun and fairly simple to make and with a little more practice, it's no telling what kind of designs I could come up with.
I got off of work, checked my net world, opened up some boxes that came today, you guessed it, more paints and stencils and canvases and water pens .....MORE TOYS !! There was quite a sale going on last weekend in several places, so I took solid advantage of it.
I hope you've all had a good week and that the weekend ahead is full of things that make you happy !
