I'm in love with these simple collage and sketch journal pages. So simple and effective.

This person's work is amazing in that it's done on garbage and using stencils and collage. Every time I look at his stuff it blows my mind. Simple and effective.

I spent Saturday making gelatin monoprints with my friend Jane. I’ve read a lot about  gelatin printing when I took a class in monoprinting in college. It’s a really simple and easy to use technique that lends itself to a variety of looks. Jane took a class with Tamar Etigen at LynnArts a few weeks ago. I found this blog about mixed media by Linda Germaine. Lots of good info on there.

First you need to make your printing plate. You need to make a big tub of unflavored knox gelatin, even sturdier than jigglers. You can buy bulk gelatin online but if you are only going to test this out, buy 3 boxes of Knox brand and mix it with 5 cups of water. This is the most expensive part of this technique. Follow the instructions on the package mixing. Pour it into a tray. we used those heavy paper disposable trays made for heating things up in a toaster oven.

Scrape the bubbles off of the top and let it harden.

We used acrylic paint and waterbased block printing ink. To use acrylic paint as ink you need to mix it with a product called retarder. You can buy Golden’s retarder for acrylic paint or speedball’s for block printing inks, both work. I liked the thickness of the speedball retarder. It allowed me to get heavy thick layers of ink on the block. The thin retarder from golden allowed me to get thin even layers.

You’ll also need a brayer. If you’ve never done any printmaking before you may want to buddy up and test this out with a friend, brayers are expensive and if you aren’t going to use them later for more printing, a pricy investment.* I preferred the soft rubber over the hard rubber.

Mix your paint and retarder well. I used about 1 part retarder to 3 parts paint. Different brands of paint used different amounts of retarder. But the 1:3 ratio seemed to work well. You can also add some gel medium to the paint to get very transparent colors.

Roll it onto the gelatin.

Here’s where things get interesting. What can you do with a solid sheet of ink? Well you can add masks and stencils to block out areas or lay down leaves from your nature walks. OR you can remove ink with q-tips, paper, old credit cards (careful not to cut the gelatin), papertowels, sponges, rags and well, just about anything. The possibilities are really endless.

Then lay a sheet of paper on it. Smooth absorbent paper works best, cardstock does wonderfully. Press down firmly. Peel it off.

Impressive isn’t it?

Spend a few hours playing with the technique. Don’t TRY to make anything. Just lay ink down, move it around, lift it up, put down multiple colors and finally print it. Don’t strive to make anything, just experiment. Make notes in your journal. What colors do you like? What colors lay over one another the best? What tool do you like?

This is one of those techniques that you can use to break up a creative rut, make background papers for collage or for you to allow happy accidents to occur. When you get an ink build up on the gelatin you can wash the ink off with tepid water and a sponge.

After you've made a few hours worth of prints you can wash the surface and toss it in the fridge for another day's printmaking. Or you can package it up and freeze it to use again. You can always melt it down in a double boiler and reform the plates. Don't ever put gelatin down your drains, it'll clog them.

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I love this guy's stuff on flickr.

His combination if drawing, collage and digital work is pretty awesome. I sometimes wish I was able to do the kind of stuff he does with digital with my work. (I should take a photoshop class.)

I’ve been messing around with my transfer technique a little more. I printed off a few of my pictures with a color laser printer onto the sticker backing sheet. The color print was very delicate, where I touched the print it scraped very easily. That being said it made a very interesting edge on one of the images- I used my finger nail and scraped the image edge up a bit to make it uneven- very cool looking.

Again, large areas of color didn’t transfer as well as smaller areas and line work. Go figure that something that is actually MORE detailed transfers better. But the breaks that appear in a larger full color image are very very cool. They look like something that has weathered in the rain and had layers peeled off.

Any areas of yellow left the sheet stained. I’m not sure this will transfer to other images or not, I’ll try that out a little later. Blues and reds transferred the best, yellows stained the sticker sheet but still transferred.

The printer I was working with was a much better printer than the cheap brother I have at home, and I expect that the quality of the HP toner has as much to do with the crisp transfer as anything else.

• Smooth paper works best for this technique.
• High heat on the iron works best. Move the iron around gently.
• Peel the sticker sheet off after it is cooled for about 15 seconds, or more if it’s too hot to touch comfortably.

This whole thing has me wondering about printing onto other slick coated stock- would I be able to do a transfer with magazine stock? I've had printing snafus with my work printer when adding address information to company stock materials. I wonder if I just over printed one of those pages if I could just transfer it?

This begins more experimentation and a search for slick paper stock.

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 These are recent journal entries and I've edited out some of the content.

Just as an FYI the Schlitz can has sold, in case you needed it for your dirtbag nasty beer can collection.