Patience

With just a day and a half of pressing....the other two ferns I collected at the pond were stiff enough and dry enough to play with on the gelli plate. I wish I would have had that third one to add to the mix...but I had fun with these two little guys today.

I used the "go to" blue/green color palette and made a whole row of prints. And this isn't even all of them.

My favorite print came from one of my favorite tried and true techniques. I rolled a subtle ombre of greens and blues....and with the paper taped to the table at the top....carefully lifted the paper and pulled the ferns off...then put the paper right back down to fill in the white spaces with the ghost print. 

It's not the best composition...but I intend to cut it up.

....and the pieces and parts are excellent!

I love that I was able to get some definition of the insect holes and negative spaces. It's amazing what you can get when you're patient...paint in the light of day...wear your glasses...and use a reasonable amount of paint!

This one was just using up paint...and I added the circles in the corners just to fill in the spaces. I used a junk sheet to start with...so there's a lot of yummy texture. A junk sheet is a piece of paper I use over and over to clean off the plate between prints.

And I thought the scheme of this one was pretty....and again...LOVE those holes.

   

I had intended to make a card using cutouts from the prints...but that will be another day. 

It was an afterthought to print another index card....and this time I outlined the print with a fine line black marker to become ICAD #18.

Practice patience! 

Now these ferns are covered in acrylic paint...

so I'll be able to use them again and again.

And just to come full circle...this is the ghost print on deli paper from the late night printing mess.  Dotty asked if the branch like veining on my card was actually the imprint of the texture in the fern.  It wasn't.

A ghost print is the paint trapped under the stencil or fern in this case.  You can see the shape of the fern...and all the excess paint around it with the veining. So it's just magic of the gelli plate along with the excess paint and the slick surface of the card!