Extended Gelli Print

The idea behind this piece was to turn one of the many gelli prints that I made into an extended work. I have been thinking maps are really cool lately and I thought that the round marking from the string in the bottom right corner kind of looked like a roundabout in a road. I started with that idea, and expended from there making roads all over the paper. I used other lines from the prints to inform where the roads bent. I used the leaf print especially to make a subdivision like look, because I used the shape of the stem to dictate where my roads bent. I wanted this to look like a stylized version of a city road map, or maps of city subways.

I began by making prints with screen printing ink and gelli plates. I put various random materials on my ink rolled gelli plate to make patterns. The ones that I ended up liking the best were the clementine bag wrapper that made a cool criss cross pattern. I also used string, feathers, a leaf, mesh ribbons, and rubber bands. All these objects made unique patterns in the ink. I chose the objects that I did because I both saw on others people's projects how they looked, or could imagine it among my other choosings.

After setting up my area with all my printing materials such as paper, the gelli plates, and ink, I picked many objects I saw as appealing. I just grabbed a ton of different materials so that I could try many different things and see how the patterns contrasted each other. I made two sets of three prints each, and I tried one where I just put ink on the objects without using the gelli plate at all. Each print that I made, I changed up what objects that I used, I would get ride of the objects I didn't like from the last print and add new ones that I thought would look better. Each set of prints included a negative space, a pattern, and a ghost print. I ended up using my ghost print for the final because you could see the pen patterns the best.