A friend and I got together to continue the mark-making experimentation.  I’m building up a good resource of coloured papers for future projects.  Some may end up as book-covers, some as inner pages, some will probably be over-printed and some might even end up as wrapping paper or cards.  Who knows and, at this point, I’m just enjoying myself.

We started rolling the acrylics on PVC sheet, adding loads of water spray and more colour layers.  Another lesson learned is that cheap hard rollers skid across the wet paint surface and don’t roll well, got to use quality if you want the results.  But isn’t that usually the case in most things?

The first thing I did was forget to wet the paper before applying it to the painted plastic, so I got a completely different effect to my previous ones.  There are still usable areas on it.

Spectacular!!  So I tried to repeat it (good luck with that!).

Still very good but you can see the start of the smudging.  The plastic sheet isn’t cleaned and dried between each print lift so there is residual paint and water which has puddled a little when you get to the second and subsequent prints.  If you want more exact results you need to clean and dry each time, even then it’s impossible to predict what the outcome will be but spotting and speckling should be quite good.

We decided to puddle on with loads of water and just see what came out.

More delicate colour, loads of texture.  Will definitely over-print this.

Lee had left a wet mess of a few colours so I pressed my wet paper down and pulled it up from one corner to get this effect.  Not my favourite, too many colours for my liking.

Lee fell in love with this vibrant red, and she got some fantastic results.  I quite like mine.

That’s more like it, my favourite colour scheme.

Oh yes, I can live with this one.  Paynes Grey, what a superb colour.  I’ll never be able to replicate this.

We moved to the Gelli plate.  We didn’t really know what we were doing as Diana had only demonstrated random colours and running paint.  I was looking for something more definite.  I guess – no, I know – that watching a couple of tutorials on-line before starting would have been helpful. Oh well, we had a good time anyway.

Both quite smudgy.  My sense is that we shouldn’t have wet the paper but we were worried the acrylic paints were drying on the Gelli plate and we wouldn’t get an image transfer.

The second attempt here is an improvement.  Well, it couldn’t have been much worse.

The patterns here are more definite and since completing these I’ve watched several tutorials so have a better idea of what to try next time.