More press-free printing

Doesn’t press-free sound more positive than press-less, as if I’m happy not to be encumbered with such a useless item? It does give me an opportunity to experiment. After abandoning the walking press I mentioned in the last post, I turned to Gelli prints and then, laden with leaves and flowers from my garden and a new stainless steel rolling pin, to rolling out prints with a lot of pressure.  I also went back into some prints, inking the leaves and flowers and applying right onto the paper.

I placed a few flowers after inking the Gelli plate. The flowers are removed before printing, leaving an impression in the acrylic paint.

Here is the same print with an overlay of directly printed flowers.

The geranium print I showed in the last post, now over-printed with leaves and flowers directly onto the print. I rolled over the leaves with the rolling pin.

Another Gelliprint with over-print. I think this is my favorite.

 

I inked a Styrene plate with block printing ink and placed a Queen Anne’s lace directly on top. I used the rolling pin to print. The process left a disappointing big white blob on the paper, so I applied paint to the flower and reprinted, then added leaves from another type of flower.

I then printed the “ghost,” or second print, after removing leaves. They leave a nice pattern on the inked plate. However, it was very faint, so I reinked the plate with a greener version of the background color, wiped out the area where the flower would appear, and reprinted. Fairly satisfactory.