Gelli Prints

Artist Statement:

For this project, we used Gelli printing blocks. For my piece, I used a few different materials that I found such as leaves, flowers, and Brussel sprouts to create my composition. My piece is of this shark-like creature with scales and a spiny dorsal fin. I took a few different things and just morphed them all together. Something that helped inspire me while adding my final touches to this piece was one of my favorite books as a kid, The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister, which is about a fish with colorful scales. It inspired me to color in my scales a few different colors as well. Overall I am pretty satisfied with how this piece turned out, I think that if I had a few more inks

The materials that I used for this piece are a Gelli printing block, leaves, flowers, and Brussel sprouts, and ink. I first used the ink to lay it on top of the Gelli, then used the other objects like the flowers, to make my composition. I thought that this material was fun to work with but it was quite difficult because you had to put more thought into how you lay your objects because that can affect the print.

For this project, we could design anything we wanted. Going into this project I had no idea what I wanted to create. As I gathered more and more things, ideas started to come to me. I gathered one leaf that had a triangle cut out of its side which inspired the idea to create a fish. Once I gathered a few more things I laid my composition out on the paper, with the intention of creating a fish, but after I printed it out it didn't quite look like what I was planning. I eventually just started to draw and it just started to morph into this shark-like thing that has scales and a spiny dorsal fin which are things sharks don't have. Like I mentioned before I also was inspired by the book, The Rainbow Fish, and I decided to color a few of the scales in and I think that it looks pretty good it just adds enough color to the piece without it being too busy.