Born to Be Free

This weekend has been quite hectic.  Friends over today and Saturday all day at an arts and crafts workshop in Rijssen.  In my last blog, Time Flies, I wrote about Part One of the workshop where we created a cool mini-canvas work of various embellishments.  Today, I’ll be writing about the first half of Part Two of the workshop.  Sounds confusing, but we created two cute cards, and for this blog entry I would like to share the first one of the two cards.

This Part Two of the workshop was with Alice Huisman, a lively and pleasant instructor who is active in creative art.  I was particularly looking forward to this part because we would be introduced to Gelli Arts, a new portable printing medium.  It is a soft plate that feels like silicone or gelatine on which you smear ink or paint on, spread with a brayer and then put your paper over it to make an imprint  For effect, you can use stencil or stamps too.  The plate can be easily cleaned and reused over and over again as it’s durable.

For this piece, I used ink stamp and stencil and made a flowered pattern in the background with the Gelli Plate.  Once we let that dry, we were able to add some stickers or paper collages on top.  Again, we were given a choice of pre-printed illustrations to work with and colour in with watercolour pens (spread with wet brush) and coloured pencils.  I chose an elephant to work on.  Then we were given a book of stickers with various quotes from which I opted for “Born to be Free”, inspired by the film “Born Free” with the vision of elephants roaming around the landscape somewhere in Africa!

 I felt this piece could do more with some other stuff around.  Unfortunately, we had limited time for working  on this further, as we had another piece to begin.   I decided to continue with this when I got home, where I also have more materials at hand.  Today, I had some spare time and added some leaves and flowers with some markers including Ecoline pens and Amsterdam acrylic pens.  To add some glitter, I used for the first time Jane Davenport’s glitter pens, and they look great!  So the finished result:

I thought the Gelli Arts was a brilliant idea!  Quite different from what I normally use and goes well with the sort of art work I do.  So I bought a large plate and three small ones in different shapes (square, round and triangle) and can’t wait to use them!  Once again, I would create my own illustrations rather than use pre-printed ones but the purpose of this workshop, I realise, was to introduce us to new methods.  I am pleased with the outcome and would like to thank Alice for this inspiring event!