When it comes to making art, I'm not completely loyal to one way of working and I enjoy having a go at new styles or techniques, or using a different medium. Call me influenced, but recently I thought I'd have a go at gel-plate printing after seeing some lovely results from other artists online. This isn't wandering too far from my normal work really as I do a lot of printmaking but the gel plate technique is new to me. If you haven't seen this before, gel - or gelatine - printing is exactly as it sounds; printing from a slab of gelatine but of course most people use a synthetic form these days. The basic premise is that you roll on layers of acrylic paint and either mark-make or add images (or do both) and then when you 'pull' the final page off at the end, you have a beautiful one-off piece of work. Simple right? Wrong.
I watched tutorials, collected pages from books and magazines of the images I wanted to print, I rolled paint, I assembled images in collage fashion on the prepared plate, left tried to take them off. Stuck. Completely adhered to the plate. They came off in scrappy bits, like a particularly frustrating label. I picked off what I could, then went ahead with the rest of the process and it was just the same. The paper just tore as I pulled it. Ok, so the first attempt was terrible. I washed the plate and tried again. Still bad, the paper came off but the images didn't transfer at all. And on and on.
I've now had three frustrating attempts at this and at the moment, it's not looking much better, but I've done some more research and I need to find images on quite specific types of paper and use the paint in quite a specific way. Research also says that this process can take quite a while to learn, a fact I chose to ignore at first. You can see from the pictures that the results really aren't great but I will recycle them in other collages, so all is not lost. But you can also see that there has been a tiny bit of improvement as the pictures go on, some of the images are at least detectable!
What's important about this sorry tale of paper-related disasters though is the failing. It's okay to fail, in fact it's necessary. If I was instantly successful at every new technique I attempted, what I am I getting from it? Bored, most likely. Failing is just a series of steps, each one necessary in order to learn, with each failure smaller than the last. Not only is this process how we learn something new, it also gives us a well-rounded understanding of all aspects of the thing we are learning. What I've learned so far this week is that gel printing is a pernickety technique and that I have to learn to get it right. Oh, and that I shouldn't be cocky.
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