Gelli Plate Art Journal Backgrounds

Although I've been creating mixed media art for a number of years now, I only really got into art journalling in January. It's always been something I wanted to do. It reminds me a little of a Judy Blume memory book I had when I was younger; filling up the pages with photos, stickers, tickets, drawings...

Anyway, I love looking at backgrounds for other people's pages. Some are so beautiful! I decided to purchase a gelli plate a while ago so I too could create lovely backgrounds! A gelli plate is basically a gel-like 'plate' (mine's 10" x 8") that you spread paint onto with a brayer, add some texture (see below), lay a sheet of paper on top, lift off and see amazing patterns!

So here are some household items I use to create the backgrounds:

You don't have to spend loads of money on proper stencils or stamps, there are so many things around the house you can use.

My first art journal was the one I started for the Documented Life Project (you can see it here), where I create the pages as I go along, following the weekly prompts. However, I wanted to make another with all the gelli plate backgrounds (boy, you really get through a lot of paper!), so I got some of my favourite pages together and bound them using stabstitch binding (handbound books was one of my many craft experiments!). This is the result:

I've only completed one page so far. It started off like this:

I think this is one of my favourite backgrounds. This wasn't actually created with the gelli plate, but was a cleanup sheet, where I rolled excess paint off my brayer and excess ink off my stamps, so I didn't really want to cover too much of it up. This is how it turned out:

I'm really pleased with it and think I managed to keep enough of the background as well. 

These are some other pages that I did create with the gelli plate:

Used the end of a paintbrush to create the swirls. Think there's a world map stamp in there too.

Used a honeycomb stencil and cutout foam shapes.

Stencil and a paper doily.

Large flowery stencil and end of paintbrush.

Used a texture roller for polymer clay and corrugated card.

My kids' lettering stencil and bubblewrap.

Here are a few more backgrounds:

Sometimes I cut them up to add collage bits to other pages. The blue strip you can see there to the left was created with bubblewrap. It's left over from a sheet I cut up to make this page:

I'll try and get around to doing a gelli plate tutorial soon. I'll also show you some ATCs I've made for a swap from the Art for the Heart Swap Facebook group. 

More coming soon:)