Last Sunday I met up with two lovely people from USk Reading for a spontaneous few hours of gelli printing. Gelli printing is so called because you apply paint and ink to a thick slab of gel and then pull it off onto paper (or fabric, or whatever) to create a unique print. It’s super easy and quick and each print is one of a kind. You can print several layers on top of each other, and you can make marks and patterns in the paint before you pull a print.

I’ve tried gelli printing once before, it was Sophia’s first time, and Huma is the expert. She warned us that it’s very experimental and the hit rate of prints we like will probably be around 10%

I think I beat those odds and liked around 30% of the prints I made!

At the end we laid out all our prints and it was so interesting to see that with all the exact same materials, we each created a set of prints with a unique feel.

Here are close-ups of some of my favourites:

We did all this at Jelly in Broadstreet Mall in Reading. This was a community day where people could donate a small amount to use the space for whatever art they wanted. A really great idea as I don’t think we’d have had as much freedom trying to do this at one of our houses. (Also much easier to clean up and no risk to soft furnishings!)

Another interesting thing was that we all super liked prints that the owner hated. My theory is that we were aiming for something in particular and when a print didn’t look like we imagined we disliked it, but other people had no expectations. So, at the end, we did a little swap of the ones we didn’t much like. I got to take home these lovely prints:

I’ve no idea what I’ll do with all these prints now! I think I’ve still got the ones from the first time I tried it out about four years ago. If you have ideas, do let me know!