Gell printing, postcards and homemade foam stamps

 

When I was in Leeds the other week I took advantage of Pebeo paints being on half price sale at Hobbycraft, and stocked up with lots of vivid colours and metallics.  Consequently, I've been messing about with the gell plate lots over the last few days, trying them all out.  

I've ended up with a decent stack of prints, and permanently paint encrusted nails.  

Today I've been chopping up some of those prints, cutting and collaging them on to a base.  I had a couple of false starts.  The idea initially was to use a PVA style white glue to stick the pieces of painted copy paper and book pages on to a substrate of thick paper.  But that didn't really work.  The collaged pieces buckled & crinkled as the thick paper wasn't thick enough to provide a firm base.  Then I tried using a glue stick and slightly thicker but still bendy card.   But the glue stick didn't firmly hold down the painted copy paper.  So my latest attempts at collaging were on a more substantial cardstock and using a proper decoupage glue.  

Once fully dry, the aim is to cut these two collages up into postcard size pieces for use as - well - as postcards!  I might stencil or stamp on them too, just to add more interest.  The colours in these photos have a washed-out look to them, though the originals are much bolder.  Not sure why the camera does that.  

On the subject of stamps, I've some homemade ones that give surprisingly good results.  They're just sticky backed foam, cut into various shapes then stuck on to cardboard.  But the cardboard isn't very practical if you want to wash paint off the foam.  It gets soggy and takes ages to dry.  But I came across this idea in a YouTube video.  

Backing your foam shape with clear plastic.  I used one of the sheets that come with a new gell plate, and which you discard when unpacking the plate, but you could use plastic from food packaging instead.  The clear plastic makes it easier to keep your stamp clean - no soggy cardboard - but also makes positioning it on your journal page or whatever you're printing much easier.  

When I've not been playing with paint I've been devouring C.J. Sansom's book 'Dominion'.  It's set in the early 1950s, in a world where Germany didn't lose the 2nd world war, and where Britain surrendered to the Nazi regime after Dunkirk.  The English society depicted in the book is all too believable, the quiet hopelessness of so many peoples lives, the 'looking the other way' when horrendous things happen because you don't want to know they're happening and you fear them happening to you.  It's a book crying out to be made into a film or TV series, though it'd be compelling but very grim watching.  

On that sober note, I'll say bye for now, and hope your Monday's got the week off to a good start.