Playing with paint

After a leisurely start, J and I spent a happy couple of hours playing with the gel printing plate I bought for her. She's been watching Instagram videos showing very attractive layered monoprints being made in this way and was keen to try. We practised applying the acrylic paint with the roller together with me providing hand over hand support, blending colours a bit, then placing re-used paper on the plate, rubbing it down and peeling it off. This produced quite pretty results which J thought might be nice to use in collages. Then we experimented a bit with string, which has potential, and cardboard shapes, which disintegrated and stuck when I tried to peel them off the plate; foam cutouts would probably work better. I didn't have high expectations for our first attempts and was happy just to see how it worked and how best to support J to manage some hands-on involvement in the process. Next time I think we'll try using leaves.