AVOID these Gel Printing MISTAKES!

gel printing can be overwhelming if you're unsure of what to do that's why today I'm sharing with you five of the most common gel printing mistakes and a bonus six one at the end that I believe is the worst one people can make so stay tuned one of the biggest mistakes people make is that they put too much paint on a gel print and I'm going to show you what I mean by that when you're putting too much paint you're gonna see what happens first of all you're going to notice right away that when you're rolling it you can't really roll it properly there's just so much paint on it and you're gonna get these really interesting effects which if you want that effect that's good but if you actually want a smooth gel print then you need to put less paint let me just show you what happens so if I put now a paper on top it works and you get this really nice pattern but you do get the really weird like ridges and stuff so if you want this pattern that's great but if you want a smooth layer of paint then it's better to put less paint and also you're not wasting as much paint in order to fix this mistake one of the things you can do have a little paper beside you so then you can just like fix some of the paint off the brayer and just take this one continue taking paint until you have that smooth layer you might need to do this a couple of times until you actually get that really smooth layer and then you press the paper and you might get still get a little bit of the stripes but it will be much different you get a much more even coat so you can still go back even with this and and do and add in that one more layer and then you can clean your plate that way as well and this one is obviously a ghost print because it's much lighter so you can get like you can see the difference of how much paint I used here okay so if you like the thickness and how it looks definitely you can do that but it's one of the most common mistakes to add a lot of paint and if you like this look then that's good but if not and you want a thinner look then just for to begin with just add a little bit of paint another mistake people make is that they put too little bit on so they put like a tiny little bit of paint because they think they should have a thin layer but then it doesn't cover the gel plate and it having a thin layer what happens is that yeah it's gonna Maybe cover very thinly but it will dry so quickly that sometimes you might not have enough time to actually put the paper on and as you can see the paint is too thin and most of it didn't go on the paper it just stayed on the plate so this will come off if I put a thicker layer so there is a way a solution to fix this you can just go ahead and put more paint usually I like putting about this amount and then when you're rolling it I'm gonna get a thicker effect and if you want to get rid of what you have on your sprayer you can just press use it to press behind so there's a little cute little tip that I usually do and this is basically the right amount and it came out so smoothly and perfectly another common mistake that people make is that they think that they have to clean up their gel plate with a wipe or something right before they do another print but what I like doing is I like layering things so what I like doing is that I like putting another color on top and then you can either just put the color and it will have that yellow tinge underneath you can also put like something like a stencil so for example I'll just put the stencil and use one of my yellow backgrounds to just clean a little bit of the design underneath so this is another reason why you don't want a thin layer because you want to make sure that you have enough time to work with the different layers so here is like a really nice design this is one of my stencils that I design and then when you go back with this you can see that there is a little bit of a yellow layer underneath so when I go back with let's say another paper and I put this down when I pull the print I should get a little bit of that yellow that was already underneath before so what you're gonna get is a two-tone effect so leaving the color on a gel plate is never a mistake so when I remove it you can actually see the Dual tones so never get rid of it if you can and you get this really cool effect and now I have even more for the next time I'm going to leave this on so never remove it because you can always get another layer out of it now if you really want to clean everything because you want to work with another medium on this so just stick a paint put it on the gel plate and then and what you need to do is actually put the paper down I'm just going to put the other side just to show you if you want to clean the whole gel plate then you just need to leave it on like this for a few minutes until it dries on the plate you want to avoid lifting it right away because it might not lift everything up so now when I remove this all the paint comes off and I get a very clean clean clean almost perfect removal so if you see here the mistake I made is that I probably didn't let it dry long enough so all of these that are not coming off is probably because I didn't let it dry long enough so these are mistakes that you can avoid by waiting longer I'm just a little bit impatient but you can see how beautifully cleans everything by waiting so sometimes waiting is your best friend and you can get a beautiful result and a really cool distressed look now of course you can just go with the wipe I prefer avoiding this part but because I want to show you a really easy way to use your gel plate I am cleaning this one of the most common mistakes with gel prints is that people think you can only use acrylic paints but in reality there's so many products that can be used such as alcohol inks markers or ink pads which in my opinion is one of the easiest things to use I like using distress oxide inks but honestly you can use any type of ink that is very pigmented and has a lot of color what's the beauty about the the inks is that it doesn't matter you don't have to wait for it to things to dry you don't it doesn't nothing happens if you put too much or too little so if you want something easy to start with then this is a great solution you kind of avoid a lot of the mistakes that are commonly made with like acrylic paint so then I just roll the same way and just smooth out the ink the way I did before and then I'm gonna place my paper and you're gonna get a very smooth and even result which is really beautiful and I still have a lot of Ink on my on my brayer so I'm just going to just put a little bit more ink here and you never have to worry about how things will turn out because the link is always going to lift it's not going to get stuck to the gel plate the nice thing about inks is that it will not dry too quickly so you'll have a lot of time to work on it and also you can't make as many mistakes and you can still use things like your stencils so for example I could just use maybe just a blue just to show you and I'm gonna put that same stencil on top press and the nice thing about these backgrounds is that you can use them for anything you can use them for collage papers you can use them as card backgrounds or anything so I don't have to worry about time because I have a lot of time the ink takes a long time to dry so I have a long time to work with it so this is a great solution for people that are afraid to mess up at the beginning so look how pretty this background is foreign mistakes that people make with gel printing is that they believe that there is ugly gel prints because honestly even if you make a mistake these can be layered upon layered and you can add more things to them to make them look beautiful and even if you don't like them the easiest thing is cheaper you can toss it away you can just use this for a beautiful card out of sentiment or add a die cut and you're good or use it as a collage piece for something and if you want to learn more techniques with gel Printing and inks click this video right here

Channel: Keren Tamir

Views: 25,363

Keywords: keren tamir, keren tamir art, mixed media, art, mixed media art, artwork, artist, mixed media artwork, mixed media artist, art journaling, art journal, art journaling heals, tell your story, tell your story through art, healing through art, healing through art journaling, a guide to art journaling, art journal process, art journaling pages, art journal collage, mixed media collage

Id: En610O0sxbE

Length: 11min 52sec (712 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2023