Flower cards using a gel press plate

I had some fun with a gel press plate today, but then they are always fun to play with so that wasn't too hard.  I spent a couple of hours building up backgrounds like this one so I can make a series of cards with these lovely busy backgrounds and fairly neutral focal points. 

What I did 😊

 I added small blobs of two different shades of green directly to my plate and then used a brayer to spread them out. I don't tend to put much paint down as I don't want to fully cover the paper I like to still see the white of the page under the layers of paint. Then I pressed the paper over the top of the plate picking up a small amount of paint, I continued until I was happy with the look, changing the direction of the paper each time.

Then I wanted to add some brighter tones, so I added a much lighter green, I really added the smallest scraping of this paint to the paper with a palette knife before pressing it on the plate to splodge it out. Once that layer was dry I applied the 4th shade of green to the plate and laid a stencil over the top. laying my paper over the stencil and pushing down gave me this final green layer.

Then I needed to add my pop of purple for contrast and I did this by applying two different purples to my craft mat and spreading them out. I used different circles that I have laying around ( I think they were medicine bottle lids, one might be part of an old plug) to pick up the paint and add it to the plate.  When I had enough circles on the plate I pressed the image to my paper.

I then stamped some flowers onto book pages and cut them out, once I had cut the background to size I positioned and glued the flowers into place layering them for extra dimension before doodling around them and the card.

xx Gemma xx