 Hello there, it's Sandy Allnok, artist here on YouTube and I am out walking with the dogs collecting greens, that's giallo in the front, Vianna bringing up the rear, he watches for rabbits and squirrels ahead and she watches behind to make sure nothing's chasing us. Yeah. And I did try to get them to take a picture while we were coming home and Vianna just never seems to cooperate but I did finally get her to turn around so we could have this precious moment and look at she's even smiling but giallo wouldn't look up the camera so we have that but anyway let's get busy with some jelly printing shall we? A few years ago I made something that I called my first jelly plate jelly printing video and I made some cards for Christmas if you want to see that one I'll link it down below and I had this great plan, this thought that I was going to mess around with acrylics more and jelly printing and I just didn't want to do it. Something about acrylics I just don't enjoy all that much, it wasn't bad for snow but I just have not felt motivated to get the jelly plates out until recently I just decided I was going to do it, a friend of mine invited me over to a monoprinting party at her house and I got excited so I got out all of my random collection of acrylics, food brands, bad brands, I have all of them in there and just started messing around. We used computer paper at the party so that's what I started with. I did go buy some deli paper, fortunately I got it for like a few dollars and I didn't waste a whole lot because it was terrible paper, I didn't like it very much this stuff, it's just too thin, it's yeah anyway. I also tried on advice of some YouTuber or somebody who had used Sumi paper and I had a pack of Sumi paper that I wasn't using for anything else and I decided to try it and liked it. I'll be using it today but this is my favorite print, it's gouache on top of the jelly plate printing and that whole combination started getting me very excited and I kept going. I kept making more and more prints because what I was trying to figure out is if I were to use gouache in combination with the jelly printing how would that work? What kind of images do I want to make? Do I want to create things that are just, hey let me find a thing to make a texture with or do I want to make images and figure out how to do that? So a lot of this was just playtime, trying to see what on earth I do but I noticed that the acrylics tend to get a little bit on the shiny side and the gouache is matte of course so you can see where I went in to repair some of the leaves that didn't come out perfect in the print which is my first idea that I had for fixing some of the not so great prints was to just do it with gouache but that wasn't going to work if I was going to use regular acrylics and I kept trying different things here and I have a bunch of stuff I want to do with some of these. I think if I paint an actual image on them like you'll see at the end of this video that's probably going to work better than trying to do fixes to the printing. This one I showed to my patrons over on Patreon so they got to see the whole video this past weekend and then here's some more that I tried doing some repair to you can kind of see the difference on the surface shiny versus matte but I went to the art store near me and I found this stuff called fleshe I think that's what it is fleshe and it is not acrylic gouache which I've had a lot of people asking questions about but it's acrylic that's matte now I suppose that might be just the same fish by a different name I don't really know but I bought a selection of a few colors to try to see what I could do with it love this green it is just absolutely delicious and these paints are just creamy and yummy so I'm going to make a print with them and then do some gouache painting on top of it now I have three jelly plates those two small ones I might take with me when I go visit my mom soon she used to be an abstract artist and was incredibly good so she might actually have some ideas for me I don't really know not sure if she's going to want to do any art or if she just want to go out to movies and dinner while I'm visiting we shall see but I'm gonna work on the big jelly plate this is an 8 by 10 and you store them with the plastic on either side store them in those cases so don't get rid of the packaging and then I'm going to use these things that I haven't been able to use for a long time they're kind of rounded rubber spatulas then I've got a couple of brares and that's really all you need even though like I used to think you have to have every stencil known to man and all the tools and all the everything you can really do a lot more than you think with just a few things that you may already have and you don't even need this spatula you could just pour paint out or if you're using tubes just squeeze it out onto the jelly plate but I'm using this little thing because I have it so why not so I'm mixing the green with some of the pains gray that I got I love pains gray as a color and I want to do some more stuff with pains gray I think might be fun to use some of these techniques to make water paintings I think so we'll see how that pans out someday and then I wanted to add a little something a little bit warmer so that I have a bit more color in here and this kind of seemed like it might be fun to splash in there now with any kind of jelly plate printing if your paint on that's touching the surface of the jelly plate gets a little bit on the dry side then it's going to be kind of stuck there so when you pull your print the stuff that's touching the jelly plate is going to be what's on top so anything you're mixing on the back the stuff that you can see is not what you're going to get on the print so what I'm trying to do with the brayer is just squish around some of the paint so that those blobs that I put down don't stay as full blobs and when I kind of turn it and squish it it actually moves the paint around so you're going to see I'm going to get some softer edges then you might normally get from doing a jelly print and I'm also putting this paint on really thick most people do not do it this thick so I'm going to do it thick because I can and this is the Sumi paper I'm using the soft side touching the ink the smooth side is on top and I'm just going to kind of press it rub it so that it presses down and I'm going to leave it for like five minutes and I am terrible about waiting for a full five minutes because the more you leave it there the more color you're going to pull up but you'll see how much stays on there and then I can do another print with it but yeah I put down way too much and that's okay because look at this kind of soft look that I get like that's so cool and it's from all the squishing around of the brayer while the paint's all wet so next up I'm going to mix a secondary color because I want to put a lighter color on top that you can start with a light color put a dark color on top you can put dark and then like whichever order that you want depends on what color you want your masked objects to be and in what color you want the background to be I'm going to mix these a bit with my spatula thingy and I don't know what this thing is called I will look it up online and put a link in the supply list down below the video so if I can find it it's I bought these ages ago I'm not even sure what for but they're very soft rubber so they're not going to do any damage to the jelly plate because you don't want to touch anything sharp to the jelly plate itself so I decided to add a little splash of that reddish brown color so that I could have just a little bit more in there and a little more variety and I'm going to squish all the color on and if you use light pressure then you can kind of keep the texture that's under there if you squish really hard then you'll push the paint around I kind of wanted a little mix of both for this next phase but again I have really thick paint here I am doing it way too thick but I like it for the technique that I'm doing so we'll call it we'll call it good we'll call it my technique because I haven't seen other people use this much paint so this is drywall tape I had some in the garage and I thought it might be fun to make a texture with that and I'm just laying it in there so I get a light texture with this you can also leave it on the plate when you roll it you know you're putting the paper on it this is a dryer ball if you've ever had a dryer ball to put in your with your clothes that's going to make some patterns and then a giant sponge to just lift up some of that color and then down goes my leaf collection my small branch and I broke off one of those leaves because it just kind of fanned out in the wrong way so I just cut it off and laid it down so that it would make sense in spot that I wanted it and then put the paper down you're never going to meet up with the edges really it's just a hit or miss thing since you can't see what you're doing when you put the paper down so maybe that's why people use the deli paper because you can see through it a little bit but I don't really care so I'm good with it when you're using a 3d object like a leaf or a stencil or something if you want sharp edges then just use your fingers to really press around the edges of the thing so that the color will transfer in those ridges because otherwise you'll end up with kind of blobby shapes so there's my leaves so that was kind of cool and now I'm going to zip through in speedy fashion the painting portion I decided I was going to put a dragonfly on this leaf since I had this whole background here why not try to see what it would be like to paint this on top of it because now I've got this matte acrylic and the matte acrylic is not going to move underneath of it so I'm not going to have any of the issues that I would have if I painted an underpainting in gouache and then I'd get all kinds of lifting didn't really matter I used a bit of that darker blue color to put underneath of the body because that's just going to be a blue color that's going to get covered up by a lot of the different shapes in the dragonfly's body so I decided to put that down so I wouldn't have to worry about messing with any of that color lifting up if I painted it in gouache in light blue now you could do this same thing in your acrylic paints you could paint on top of whatever you've made for your background if you want to paint a dragonfly as well I will put a link to the photo that I used I flipped it left to right but I'll put a link to the photo in the description down below and you can see the dragonfly so he's got a thin body that kind of goes out to the tails kind of little forked point on it and sections that are in his in his body along the way with fantastic reflections on there really cool and then his body gets thicker as it gets up to the top but it's hard to see in the photo I was kind of trying to see through the wings because you know the wings cover up part of it so it's difficult to tell where one thing begins the other thing ends but you know I kind of figured out where those shapes would be and then could paint the wings on top it's much more difficult to do transparent wings on top of other things than it is to do it this way when you can just paint some solid paint on top of the background so that's one of the reasons why I thought of this photo that's been in my collection of things that I wanted to paint at some point and when I realized I had this I thought ooh that would be kind of cool because when we were out collecting leaves I saw a dragonfly and put two and two together over the greenish kind of light color back there I'm using a muted green for the color that goes on top of it for the wings and then more purples and reds on top of the leaves themselves because it's got that reddish color to it so that it kind of looks like it's transparent and then some spots are just going to be white that's going to make it look like it comes and goes with the shimmer and using the patterns that I saw in the dragonfly wings I was not being like super accurate with it this was just a test to see how this would work and then added some of the veins in a thin thin thin brush in black so don't have any real black too much real black in here except in the leaves in the background but it was kind of fun to add that in and some of the places where my little dots got blobby I could clean those up just a tinge and paint that in now you could also use an ink pen on top of this on top of gouache you can draw with anything I don't know on top of this matte paint I'm not really sure whether or not that is something that can handle having having you paint with ink on top of it like using a fountain pen or something but I just decided to use the gouache so all that would fit together then it came to adding the legs of my little dragonfly and painting them right over top of the leaf that's there figuring out where I could connect him so that his legs would kind of hang out in the right places I don't know anything about dragonflies so I was kind of figuring out as I went there are some hairy places on the top of him so I did add some of the furriness both in a light color and in a dark color and then it was a matter of adding the shadow so that he's literally flying you know his back end is up high above the leaf and putting the shadow there because it'll be closer to him by his head further away from him by the tail and then the legs will each have a bit of a shadow underneath of them and then I did a bit of repair to some of the leaves I wanted to see if I could tell the difference when the gouache dried and the acrylic dried and they literally dry the same you can't tell when you're really looking at it unless you know you're looking I suppose really super close if my painting was imperfect but they go really well together it all looks like a very matte painting and then there was this one spot where it got a little bit globby in the leaves I should have repaired that first but I mixed up a color that looks somewhat like the background color so I could change the shape of that leaf so there's my crazy project for today kind of fun kind of messy kind of mixed a little bit of this little bit of that another reason that I got out all the mono printing jelly plate printing stuff is because tear Smith who I work with on the gratitude junk journal class every year she's getting things together and asked if there is a new sample of work that I wanted to use as an example of the kind of things that I create so I center this I use one of the backgrounds put it in a journal and paint it a hair and over it in gouache so there might be some gouache in my lesson for this November not really sure how that'll go but that's sort of what I'm thinking now if you'd like to go see one of the previous gratitude junk journal classes you can get them for 20% off through the end of August so I'll put a link in the doobly-doo if you'd like to go check it out and get an idea what gratitude junk journaling is all about and see a lesson from me in each one of the last couple years so I will see you guys again on Saturday take care subscribe if you haven't hit the like button and I'll see you later go create something every day