Gelatin Monotypes

Beth and I got together yesterday and played with gelatin monotypes.  Beth had the camera and took the process pictures so I will let her tell the process and procedures.  Too keep this post from being too long, I will only show one type of print I made.  I'll post a second type of print later.

For these prints I worked from light to dark and used Orange Rust, Fuchsia, and Navy Blue dyes. To create designs, I used template plastic cut into squares and rectangles and some fancy "yarn."  I will happily show you the best of these prints.

What I learned:
1.  First I tried rolling the dye onto the gelatin plate but it was too thin of a layer to print well. After that we used a credit card to spread the dye.  The "best" thickness took some experimentation.
2.  Beth and I had different thicknesses of dye paste.  We found the thicker dye paste gave us better results.
3.  The size of the bubble patch is important.  Our gelatin plate had two huge sections of bubbles.  Therefore, all of our prints have areas that are really heavy with dye. (see above)  If I were to make another gelatin plate, I would separate the bubbles into smaller groupings.
4.  If you are careful about laying down the fabric, you can get shadows of the bubble blobs in the different colors used on the plate.  I kinda like the look.  Here is a close-up. Notice the orange and fuchsia shadows of the navy.

5.  The thickness of the dye over the bubble section is really critical. Those bubbles can hold tons of dye and can saturate the fabric with dye leaving great blobs.  However if the bubbles are carefully scrapped leaving less dye, you can get great patterns.  Here are the good, bad, and ugly pictures of bubbles.