An artist friend from SLMM showed us a quick technique for adding texture from a gelli plate, and I ran with the concept. I had a stack of small travel sketches, made in November: what would they look like with some coverage?

First — a quick mixing on my palette: I used white, titanium buff, and just a drop of Quin Gold. Blending colors is so satisfying! I rolled out some of this warm beige onto my gelli plate, and applied the travel sketch, face-down. I used a baren to burnish it*, trying to make sure it didn’t slip. This technique is not precious, and a rough layer of paint on the plate is fine.

Here’s one of the sketches before coverage, left, and after, right.

Look at the warm glow it adds! Using this method across the set of sketches unifies them, even more so than the limited set of materials I was already bound by, while traveling.

Next up, I always take an impression of the gelli plate afterwards. It cleans up the plate and gives me some texture and likely collage fodder too.

As an alternate method, or if you don’t have a gelli plate handy, you can get much the same effect by just rolling paint right onto the collage with a brayer*, and similarly lifting an impression from the collage with a spare piece of paper. It does wonders for collages you aren’t too sure about!

With all 15 travel sketches getting the same treatment, I’ve got a pile of transformed pieces, ready for the next pass — maybe a scan, before adding more — and a new pile of quiet collage material to use wherever I need a soft yellow-beige.

* Footnote: product links are not endorsements — they’re just for illustration purposes. But they do show tools similar to what I have, and where I shop.