Fibre Optics Group: FOG Tuesday - Gelliarts™ Plates, Glue Gun Stencils and Mono Printing

While we were humming Baby It’s Cold Outside things were heating up in our session last Tuesday. After our warm up collage (see previous post) we launched into using Gelliarts™ plates, glue guns and a plethora of other stuff to make glue gun stencils and mono prints. For those of you who do not own a Gelliarts™ plate, they are very cool, but if you are just mono printing you can do much the same on a piece of plexi glass, glass or on a transparency. However, if you are using the glue gun stencils you need a bit of the cushiony give that the Gelliarts™ plates have and a large piece of fun foam gave some pretty good results as Jan found out.

The first order of business was to make stencils using hot glue by making designs onto a non-stick craft sheet or parchment paper. There are several videos online where you can view this technique. Here is a link to one on Diana Trout’s website where Jane Davies does an excellent demo.

Terri's Glue Stencil

Type of glue gun stick did seem to make a difference so you might want to be more organized than I was to know exactly what type of glue stick that you had in order to track its success. Thinner lines, placed further apart and a flatter end product seemed to act better as a stencil when put into use on the Gelliarts™ plate. The stencils themselves ended up looking like art as seen in this glue stencil of Terri’s.

Siri's Mono Prints on Paper
Left with glue stencils and overprints, Right commercial stencil

You can mono print onto hand made paper, fabric, card stock or deli paper. The only problem with the fun and ease of using this product is that you end up with a gazillion finished pieces and then you need to come up with a gazillion projects to use them in.