Earlier this month I had a giveaway for a set of custom designed notecards. The winner was my buddy, Jennifer Reno. Jennifer told me she loved blues and was into paisleys.
I love blue too so that was excellent, always LOVE to create with it. BUT paisleys? Hmmm, sounded very zentangley (zentanglee?!)...and I found out some time ago that I am not great with zentangles and doodling. I guess I just don't have the imagination or the patience for it. But I wanted Jennifer to love her notecards so I went about searching out paisleys.
I checked Google images, Flickr and Pinterest. These are my go-to's for free images. I also looked at the Silhouette online store cutfiles but didn't like any of those. Finally found two sets I liked on Google. I tried a couple ideas, first I tried to sketch them out. As I mentioned I have no patience with intricate line work so I scraped that idea - real quick! I decided to just marinate on it, something would come to me.
I knew that whatever I ended up doing I definitely would need some blue papers. I like to create my own papers to use as my backgrounds. My favorite method is gelli printing. Those of you who aren't familiar with monoprinting may not know what that is. Well, its a method where you use a GELLI plate, in my case I purchased mine, but you can make your own (loads of recipes and how-to's on Youtube, here's just one - How to make a gelatin plate )
You can use all types of mediums and papers to print with a gelli plate. I mainly use cardstock, deli paper and regular copy paper. For color I tend to use acrylics (the least expensive work best) but I sometimes also add ink sprays, oil paints and watercolors. The real fun begins when you add textures, anything from stencils to items you find around your home (like maybe the bottom of a flipflop!)
Here's a short time lapsed video of me gelli printing some backgrounds for Jen's notecards:
In the end I decided to do some adjusting to the images I found of the paisleys. I traced and cut them out using my Silhouette Portrait. I adhered these cutouts to my background papers and then added just a few touches and, VIOLA! Fini!
Unfortunately the photos can't capture the textures, so much cooler in person.
I hope that Jennfer likes them.
PS Used some of the leftovers to make my daughter a journal.
MORE INFO:
A list of Youtube videos on adding texture to gelli prints - CLICK HERE
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