I bought some Speedball Speedy-cut and a set of lino cutters and experimented with combining stamps with gelatin printing using the pose of Ursula, a photographer herself and a dedicated ashtanga practitioner, doing Ustrasana, or camel pose. The smaller stamp from yesterday is Peg Mulqueen in laguvajrasna.
Here are the stamps:
And here are some of the prints. You won’t believe how I got the background:
Here I cut out a masking stencil to change the dimensions and see a cleaner edge:
Not a bad day, after all. I rolled Indian corn gently but with a little pressure over the jello. Then combined a few other things with it. I could use some different size pans to make gelatin plates in. I could also cut them down to size.
So these are all Speedball inks, which come in “brown” and “yellow” instead of “burnt umber” or “hansa yellow.” I like a little more specific information about the pigments I’m using so I’m thinking of trying Golden Open acrylics, which are slower drying acrylics and which I could also use to paint with and use my good bristle brushes, which generally you can’t use with acrylics. Then there’s Daniel Smith block printing ink, which is oil based but water soluble I think?? The consistency of the Speedball inks can be a bit gummy and I wonder if that is due to filler.
The annoying thing is that nothing holds the delicate nuances of pattern like the jello itself, so it’s hard to get patterns onto the stencils, and even if I do they don’t always release from the stencil. I’m sure that Linda Germain wrote about this somewhere on her blog, and next I want to try freezer paper stencils and see how that works out. After I carve a few more stamps.
Deborah Santoro 