Magazine Image Transfer with the Gelli Plate: Part 1

hello everyone welcome to my channel devon rex for art here today i'm going to be discussing magazine image transfers so i enjoy doing them they're very fun um they can be very frustrating they don't always work um yeah they don't always work so i'm gonna talk about a few different types of techniques i'm gonna talk about um troubleshooting um image selection and all that kind of jazz so i've really been trying to get prepared for this video so that i can present it in a really succinct clear way so the first thing i'm going to talk about is the um what image transfer is so basically you take a magazine image it's actually a resist technique so when you have your paint or whatever down the paper is going to pick up the paint but the black ink areas are going to resist picking up the paint or the usually paint what you have on there so that's why it's a transfer but it's actually a resist so the first thing we're going to talk about is the contrast like image selection um you want something with lots of contrast obviously uh printing with black and white is the highest contrast uh but you can do colored with contrast what you don't want is something like like that would not be very good contrast you know all the tones are very similar there's not really a high contrast portion to that um that's an example what subject so you can do people i like doing people quite a bit uh but you can also do um objects uh like that would be a good example you can do print text i mean you can do places for example in this travel magazine i have i took out different pictures from this travel magazine and i collage them together so we're going to try that one you can see there's lots of high contrast areas the other thing is the magazine so this magazine i'm pretty sure i've used it before and i think it works but we'll find out but not all magazines will work it depends on the ink they've used what the paper that they print on for example i don't find that national geographics do very good fashion magazines will work some won't so the ones that i found that work for me and it could be um this could be country specific too right so fashion magazine fashion magazine uh vanity fair seems to work for me vogue seems to work for me um like i said some travel magazines uh martha stewart wedding seems to work for me and then local magazines you can try your local magazines so i have um this avenue magazine and alive which is a local magazine so really i would say try it if you really really love the image i would say make a copy because there's no guarantees it's going to work even if it's in a magazine that you know works for you i and you really really love the image make a copy of it because none of these techniques are foolproof and it doesn't always work some people will use um laser copies i've never done that i don't have a laser printer but i've heard that works the paper you use to pick up so when you're doing your magazine transfer the paper that you're using to pick up makes a difference so this is a composition book and i've actually double i've actually glued the pages together i find that thinner paper it will be kind of wrinkly and it's not as crisp an image you can use thicker paper has to be absorbent obviously never use photo paper on your jelly plate i'll just add that as in the side um the other thing i like to do first is i like to warm up my plate i don't do i usually don't do an image transfer right off the bat so i've already warmed up this plate meaning i've done a few pulls already so the first technique i'm going to show is just using acrylic paint and i'm going to start with this liquitex basics and you want to put a thin even coat not super thin but it definitely can't be too thick if it's too thick then even the white areas or the lighter parts of the magazine will won't absorb the um won't pick up the paint so you won't really have a very good contrast damage so here i've just put on some paint and i can feel like my it feels slippery i can tell there's too much paint on there so i'm going to remove some of the paint using my brayer and then i roll it off onto another piece of paper to deposit the paint i just picked up and again i can see it's nice and even now and not too thick but not too thin so that you just have to kind of play with so we're going to do this image this is from the magazine called fashion and then you want to avoid getting air bubbles in there i could have put it up i should have put it up higher but i didn't so and here i can feel i have a few little air bubbles i'll try to squish those out but we'll see what happens and this won't look like a perfect reproduction if you wanted a perfect reproduction you could just put it in your photocopier so you pull it up to check and i can see that has worked quite well i can see um my image there you can see her eye you can see the spots you can see the text there quite well and you can see it's all the white areas picked up the black paint and what happened is where there was black the paint stayed on the plate so that's the basic premise if you live in a humid environment you might find uh you need to try different things if you look work live in a super dry environment you might have to alter things where i live it's pretty dry people that live in humid environments often they can just directly pick this up because the paint's still wet i find my paints already starting to dry so what i do is i let it dry completely before doing my pickup print so i'm going to just um keep the camera on and then i'll just cut out the printing the the drying time and i'll let you know how long it took although it's going to be different i mean it's not a hard and fast rule how long to leave it sit you need to leave it sit till it's dry the way to check that is you can look an angle and if the paint looks wet then it's still wet if it looks more matte then it's dry you can also use your finger to test a portion that you don't mind if it gets a bit of texture and i can see there still it's picking up the paint so the paint is still wet so let's let that dry i'll just add that i always let it dry naturally um i would never use a heat tool on the jelly plate i have seen people use more of a cool air or fan that's probably fine um i find where i live it's pretty dry like i said things dry fairly quickly so i don't mind waiting um the other thing i want to mention is you see oh it worked i've got an image there i'm good not quite so this is step one the pickup is just as important so you're not out of the woods yet if you got to this stage you just have to um keep practicing um and um to get into a rhythm and even then it doesn't always work all right so we'll see you when it's dry so even though i don't use a motorized fan sometimes i will fan it myself just with um this is a clay texture plate i just fan it a little bit and we'll check it so even though it's a bit shiny because of the type of paint it is it's not really picking up on my finger so i'm going to go ahead and try that it hasn't really been that long so the next step is what do you want to pick it up with so i think about color so this is black paint as the base so you don't want to pick like a dark brown to pick it up because you want to show so i'm going to use something lighter and you don't have to stay with traditional flesh tones i often like to use a variation of color when i pick it up so for example this one i used greens and i used light green and i used a blue i used some paint that was shiny um actually i think all of it was shiny so that does make a good um contrast too let's do that let's use some um some glossy or shiny paint i'm gonna use color shift orange and color shift purple now i'll have to be careful where they blend they might end up giving me sort of a brownish vibe so i'm going to roll off in between colors you'll see what i mean here so i'm gonna put the and with craft paints you're gonna well all paints really you gotta make sure it's mixed so i'm gonna put some orange and put some purple and this isn't the easiest color combination to work with but we will try it so i like to roll in one direction to get the paint initially on so i'm not pulling the paint off so i'll roll forward until it's mostly spread and then i'll roll back and forth and where this transition is i'm just going to go in very lightly and you want your pickup layer to be quite thin so obviously here you can see through it because of the type of paint it is it's a bit easier to see through it but we'll do it again with uh more of an opaque paint and i'll show you that you still need to have it thin so i'm going to use my composition book and i'll be using different um papers as we go and again you want to put your paper on avoiding bubbles and you want to rub rub rub i'm going to just stick a piece of paper in between here so that i don't get my hands dirty and i'm going to rub that and basically this part is the paper that you've put on is absorbing and adhering all the paint and you want it to fully get on there so you need to rub it so i've got that pitch off so you want to rub it make sure it's best to rub it while it's wet once it's dry it's a little harder to get the paint to stick the crease of the composition book doesn't really pick up as well but that's okay so i'm going to take a peek so i'm peeking and you can see that the image is not on the plate anymore it is now on my paper so you just pull it up easy peasy there you go so that's the first one so you can clearly see her eye the text came out really well um you can even read that text sometimes you might want that more distressed here it didn't quite pick up the paint um i'll show you a technique that i use sometimes to if there's a large area that doesn't pick it up i have a trick we can use so um that will probably happen later if not we'll we'll make it happen and i'll show you that trick so that's print number one so that's in my comp book on the next one i'm going to pick up with just regular copy paper right so let's try this one i believe is from a vogue and the contrast isn't quite as much but um i think it should work so i use the liquitex basics this time i'm going to try just to craft paint to show you the difference and this paint is maybe a little bit thinner and it might dry a little faster sometimes i find there's little um paint blobs but the concept is the same so sometimes you have to adjust your speed or your thicknesses depending on what paint you have all right so here i can see it's sort of uh it's a little bit thin and liquidy but we're gonna try that i want to make sure you get her head and how much you rub makes a difference if you rub too long then the paint might actually stick to the darker areas of the picture so it's a fine line and every magazine is a little bit different depends how absorbent the paper is to so there we have that so because the contrast wasn't quite as great in this print especially at the front it didn't really work also with this um craft paint it kind of bubbled up on the surface so i think that's why i usually tend to stick with the thicker paints for the initial lay down and then for the pickups i don't mind using the um craft paints as much so you can only do it once per image you can do the other side if you let this dry you could try the other side if you like that image as well so again you still want this to dry and i can see it's already dried because that craft paint dries super quick now this is a good opportunity to show you that you can add textures you don't have to um pick it up all at once so i'm going to just take out a few texturey things let's just use a blue and then i'm going to create some pattern in the background because there's a lot of empty white space you can see i just go forward all right so this isn't my final um pickup layer so the print the um it can be a little bit thicker i do like to have it thin enough that i can see where the image is i don't know if you can see that but i'm just adding just some different textures around and i'm avoiding where the images because i don't want to pull up that image okay so that's pretty good so now we let that dry okay that looks pretty dry um the reason you want to dry is when you're adding the next layer if it's not dry your brayers just going to pick up and smudge that paint so that's why and i think that's probably where most people run into trouble is they're not patient if they don't let it dry and then it everything kind of just smushes together i'm going to use a pbo violet blue iridescent because it's going to give me nice shiny pops of color it's going to contrast well with the blue and it's going to contrast well with the main image so here this is where you want to make sure that your paint layer isn't too thick and it's always best to put on too much and remove it if you put on too little and you feel like it's starting to lift up the paint then i would just stop there wait and then just apply another color or another coat all right so you want a nice even coat and fairly thin um i think pretty happy with that all right so you can see you can still see the image well at least the other part so i'm gonna lift put this on and you wanna rub really well until that paint dries now my paper is on crooked but that doesn't bother me if you really um if that bothers you a lot i would stand up and i find the edges tend to not pick up as well so i like to rub that another trick i mentioned some of my other videos is using where is it here it is i have this lid that is very smooth on the surface and it works really well to just push down so here you can see this copy paper it is wrinkling a little bit but not so much i don't think that it's going to interfere with the image very well very much if you use like tracing paper or really thinner like i find this or is it this graph paper i have it tends to wrinkle you can feel i can feel it still wet and cool but it might be okay so we're gonna just lift that up you can see the edges didn't um pull up but that's okay it'll add interesting texture to your next print all right so here's that one so it's adequate like i said i don't like how the craft paint was bubbly but you get the idea and then you can always enhance pictures so this is one trick so let's say i want to like really show that like this is a stabilo and then there's my paintbrush so just because this is what you got doesn't mean you can't alter it you know acrylic paint is not water reactive so you can use other things to enhance your picture so there so we can see her outline a little bit better all right next um so usually i use like a dark paint for the for the first layer before i put my magazine on but you can use other colors right you can use like i've used dark purple quite a bit um dark green this one here was done with purple this one was done with purple this one was done with green so you don't have to always just use black but you can also do with lighter colors and then you get kind of like an x-ray look so i'm going to use unbleached titanium and i probably should have picked an image first because the problem is you don't have very much time once you roll it i find for these sort of x-ray type it's best to use something with really high contrast let's try this one's that so i'm going to roll this on and i put way too much paint on but that's okay because i can bray it off so starting to run out of time there that's pretty thin lay down my print and i'm going to give it a nice rub so there's our basically negative of this one now i find with the purple with the black or the really dark colors you can't use the magazine image again but with like a purple or a green or this you can still use this in your journals right you basically modified this image so i would keep that i wouldn't throw that away i'll show you another example so this is the image uh the magazine that i got it from so you can use these images elephant collage i used the leftover jelly prints that i had used purple with see there so don't throw those away you can use them again if it's black paint you can't use it because you can't see anything all right so is this dry oh i waited too long so see it's already dry so i can't add anything more there so if you want to add extras in the background you need to do it before it's dry so that's dry all right now here there that's actually a spot that the paint didn't pick up so here's another hack you can use a baby wipe or a wet cotton bud to remove areas so that's gonna show up as a spot on her so i'm gonna just do a bit of uh photo editing while it's on the jelly plate so that's the other troubleshooting hack you can use is you don't have to leave the images as is speaking of which i could probably wipe off some paint since i waited too long to add that pattern i'm just gonna do that okay so like i said that's pretty dry i'm gonna wait for these sections that i altered to dry up all right now for the pickup print when you're doing this x-ray technique it is good to use a darker paint your paint that you put down has to be opaque though this one here has a bit of a linen finish to it and this paint wasn't quite as dark as i was thinking it was i want to be able to have it thin enough that's going to pick up all the layers put that on while it's wet i don't like it let me try it again with white so you can see i don't know i find that hard to see now that brings me to another technique junk journal shop johnny she uses black gesso so i was going to show you that but let's try with white gesso first to see if we get a good see if we can get a good um x-ray type oh that reminds me i didn't pick out my image always pick out your image first this one let's do that one that might make a good um negative because her glasses are so prominent so i don't i've never done this with white gesso i have tried the black gesso and it works well so i'm going to show you that next but this let's just try this little inverted x-ray technique with the white gesso and that's a really cool image so again once the magazine dries we might be able to do this side and get this this cool girl all right so it's a little splotchy but definitely you can see her quite well there see here it's a little bit splotchier let's just add a little bit of white interest to the background that wasn't there so i'm going to just take a little white and just kind of do that a little bit too much paint there that's gonna take forever to dry so i'm just gonna pick that up let's use this pink on this half and this purple on that half so this is more of a iridescent color and this one is dark dark dark and hopefully that gesso is um opaque enough to give us a good contrast let's start with the pink side first and the purple and i'm actually going to bring the purple all the way across that's pretty good so that one is i'm much happier with i can actually see the face titanium buff wasn't the right choice uh white i think would be the way to go or like a light pink or something like that so i think that's pretty cool and you can see the shimmer from the um the pbo dyna even where the dark purple went and like on with it you can see that gives a really cool effect so i'm just gonna wipe up some of that all right so the next thing i'm gonna do is um the black gesso and i think instead of doing a person we'll do an example where you're using objects or places so we're going to try this little collage one that i prepared so we'll do this one so i'm going to get black gesso i don't have a lot of black gesso i just have this deco art americana black gesso so there might be variations in whichever gesso you use on our black gesso and again you don't want it too thick but you want to get it thin before it starts to dry there so i can start to see through it and i'm not i'm pushing hard on the paper i'm not pushing hard on the jelly plate when i'm doing that so we're gonna put on our collage image and again you press but not too long all right so the lighthouse worked really well um i think this part worked well this there wasn't as much contrast there was a bit of background there was this girl here it's very blank here i'll probably add some textures i'll do like a two-step pickup i was going to do a jelly plating video using some items from the dollar store and one of the items i found were these um seahorses kind of do like a seahorse there maybe something that's got like waves in it this is fun foam and it has a texture to it i use that on the jelly plate a lot so we're gonna do that so that's pretty dry so we're using our white and then we're going to press in some interesting textures no why am i getting like chicken feet all right i'm gonna clean my brayer after this all right so i can't see my image so i just have to try to remember where things were do some waves here maybe there okay so i'll let that dry and while it's drying see i've got this that's why i have a chicken foot there's a clump of paint probably because i was using like an old piece to um wear off okay so that's nice and dry i've cleaned oops i've cleaned off my brayer and um i'm gonna wear off on this magazine instead and i'll just rotate that way i won't be getting chunks back on this i'm not going to bother with different colors because really it's only going to show here and where there's like a little bit of space oh gosh that's a lot of paint that's too much paint so you can remove the extra paint as long as you bring it off if you're just thinking you're thinning it by going back and forth you're not really you've got to remove the paint from the brayer i'm just evening it out not really removing much all right that looks good this book isn't really wide enough to get that whole image so i'm just going to go ahead and use a linen finish off-white paper that's the thing with jelly plating is you it's good to be think ahead and be prepared but always be ready to um go with the flow let's see drum roll remember this was the gesso the black gesso right there it's not quite picking up i don't mind that because it gives it a beachy distressed look all right so there's our print you can barely very clearly see the lighthouse i can't see her so much so i'm glad i added some details there and this is very clear too so that would look great in a beach journal beach theme you can see the lady there you have to look really carefully to see her she wasn't the best contrast but that lighthouse is cool you don't have to use the whole print i mean i could cut out this lighthouse and use it you know just use the parts that you like i'm going to try to show you um a hack i have developed i don't know if anybody else has used it but um i've used it where i use matte medium to fix a print purposefully um try to miss an area on the pickup not on the transfer you need to do the transfer needs to be a good image to start the non-craft paints are kind of smoother for this first layer for the transfer part it's not to say you can't use craft paints for the first part just for me it just seems to give me a more consistent result all right i'll put this down something to give you a bit of texture around the edges that's just a place mat from the dollar store and then again remember we don't want to leave that on too long um right there there was a bit of a bubble just going to soften it i'm just going to put some here i use my brayer to add it to this see if we can press it on there to get a little bit and we also got some crunchy bits from from this too which that's fine so let that dry and what i'll do is i'll purposefully not put some paint in this area and then i'll show you how you can use matte medium to pick up an area that fails to pick up oh shoot i forgot okay i missed some areas there i don't know i forgot i went on automatic pilot oh dear all right let's try this okay if it doesn't work we'll i can't show you a mess up on purpose uh that's uh very interesting so i'm not going to rub too hard there i'm going to see if i can like have it not pick up there by just avoiding rubbing there okay so yeah so see here where it didn't pick up so i'm not taking this off fully i want it to stay registered meaning it remembers where it was and i'm going to take just a little bit of matte medium so which is basically like clear acrylic so it's it acts like a glue i put mine in a soap uh dispenser like a dish soap dispenser um because i saw didi do that dd willingham and it's really cool so you just add a bit of matte medium and then i just use my fingers to spread it so that it's sort of thin and then i put this down and i wait for it to dry and then hopefully we'll have a ta-da moment here this is hard to get off your fingers because it's kind of like glue let's see a bit more time you can see i picked up this part so there we go so here this is the section i repaired with the matte medium if i had been more patient i could have picked that up too but that's okay i'm going to try to show you the method that some people seem to be able to do where you pick it up you pick up your print right away i'm going to use something fairly bright to do that like i said for me it's very dry here so i don't know if this is [Music] i've never been very happy trying to pick it up right away but i thought i would give it a try for you guys i'll try that so you have to be ready with your paper right away because um i said it um as soon as it dry oh as soon as it dries it's not going to stick to the paper so i'm going to try to be quick here quick quick quick put my image rubber so i just noticed that this fashion magazine that i have is actually canadian magazine so i'll pull that up let's do her face a little bit more okay right away before that dries you put your other paper on and you hope it sticks i said for me because it's so dry here this doesn't usually work but i thought i would show you the idea of it so for example if you find like your paint takes a long time to dry and that's annoying you you could do this technique instead for me i don't usually find that's the case so so that worked that's not bad so there so you can just pick it up directly uh just on white paper or on paper that has some a painting paper that has some lighter uh colors on it so that's kind of cool i like the brickwork how the brickwork picked up the paint so that kind of has like a pop art look i'm definitely gonna use that in the journal so that's all i'm gonna cover for magazine image transfers um in this video i was hoping to get to a technique um popularized by bridget coopson where she uses stazon ink or other ink to do a transfer but this video is getting a little bit long so i'm gonna keep this video as a part one and i will try some other techniques in a part two at a later date and i really appreciate you watching i hope you found this helpful and um go out there give it a try um it's not always going to work try different magazines try different paints and find out what works for you and with your paints and your climate and yeah go and have fun all right thank you so much for watching please like subscribe share all that youtubey stuff alright bye now

Channel: devonrex4art

Views: 41,098

Keywords: Gelli plate, Gelliplate, Gelliprint, Gelliprinting, Gelliprinting techniques, Gelli plate techniques, Gelliplate techniques, Magazine image transfer, Image transfer with gelliplate, Image transfer with Gelli plate, Magazine and gelliplate, Image transfer tutorial, Mixed media tutorial

Id: m-CPqtDJYXw

Length: 41min 26sec (2486 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021