The joy of gelli prints
Santie Roelofse just loves it when a plan gels together.
The Mossel Bay artist discovered gelli prints, also called gel prints, recently and she is hooked.
Gel prints are a form of monoprint.
Santie makes her own gel plates, using glycerine and gelatine.
There are recipes on the internet for making gel plates, but some of them use alcohol in the mix.
“I don’t know why people use alcohol. I only use gelatine and glycerine. There is nothing you can better about my gelli plates.
“Glycerine plasticises something. You can make it with just gelatine, but the glycerine makes it permanent.”
Gelli plates are expensive to buy, so many artists are making their own.
Crack
If Santie's plates crack, she pops them into a pot on the stove and melts them and moulds them again into the shape she wants.
"I enjoy it immensely," she says. "You can use any water-based medium on the gelli plate. I experiment and look at what other artists are doing. There is someone in the United Kingdom, Sally Hirst, who does amazing work with gelli plates. She also does collagraphs."
Fine art
Santie notes: "I try to do monoprinting and fine art using the gelli plate. Some use it for crafts, to print cards, but I try to achieve painterly effects in gelli prints.
"It's cost effective using water-based paints and my prints sell well.
"I sell my A4 gelli prints for R600 and A3 ones for R1 000."
Santie also does hyper-realistic pencil drawings, usually portraits, for commissions. These are extremely time consuming and she sells them for thousands of rands. She finds gelli printing is a fun, welcome relief from these painstaking drawings.
To make her gelli plate, Santie melts gelatine in water and then adds glycerine and stirs the mixture.
Bubbles
"There mustn't be bubbles. I work with a spatula and press out the bubbles. I have one beautiful stainless steel dish that is totally smooth."
She uses this dish as a mold. "It's
very quick. You put it in the fridge and then you must carefully take it out."
She said if one is not careful, the gelli plate can break, but at the same time, it "can take a hammering". If it does not survive the hammering, that is when she melts it again and sets it in the fridge.
When asked why she does not simply use glass as a plate for monoprints, Santie says: "You usually do monoprints on Perspex or glass and you use printer's ink.
“But the ink makes a mess and, different from the water-based paints, you must use solvents,” she points out. Also, printer's ink is expensive.
Responsive
Most importantly, Santie notes:
"Gelli is extremely responsive. You can use a broad brush to cover the plate.
“It picks up she softest and faintest marks.
“The techniques are many. Anyone with a sense of 'pretty' can do gelli prints children and adults.
"You can even use fabric
paint that is water-based and print on a T-shirt."
Santie prints on Fabriano paper, but you can also print on tissue paper and more.
She would like to give gelli print classes, to introduce people to the concept, so if the idea gels with you, call her (062 429 4729).