gel sticks

Yesterday my son was invited for his first birthday party, which meant that I had a couple of hours to myself.

And instead of doing all sort of chores (grocery shopping, cleaning, washing,..) I decided to be selfish and spent it with crafting.

I still needed to test-drive my gel sticks and that is exactly what I did.

I experimented with all  kinds of techniques, and wow are they versatile.

Here’s a summary of what I tried:

Applying and smearing them out with my finger (dry) 
lesson learned: probably best to do the techniques on a gessoed surface.

Applying color, spritz some water and paint with a brush

    Same as above but using finger as paintbrush,really like this.

Blending together with a babywipe (love the softness of this)

     

color a raised embossed image

color, activate the pigment with water and paint with finger or brush;let it dry; take a stencil and babywipe and create a tone-on-tone effect.(this definetely only works on a gessoed surface) Depending on how long you wipe the color difference becomes larger or you can even remove all the color.

Stamping:

there are different possibilities:

first spray water, then add color and stamp (see left image)

Or first apply color, then water and stamp (rigth image)

Or just color and no water (right image)

you can also use foam stamps

even a detailed stamp gave good results, although I had read that this was not the case:

To create a nice texture you can sprinkle some salt in the wet paint, let it dry completely and wipe off the salt.

or you can also create some drippage  

                 

Some resist techniques:

with hot glue

with heat embossing

Conclusion after a relaxing session in my studio: it seems that everything with gelli in it is way too much fun!

PS: Have not done any research, but it seems that you do need to fixate the finished piece? With what?