What can you do when you want colorful fabric that’s uniquely yours? Print it on a gel plate! That’s how I made the colorful fabric that I turned into protective face masks. I never would have expected to be needing these- but if it helps keep us all safer, and this blasted virus to go away faster, I’m all in!

Gel printing on fabric is just like gel printing on paper. All the same techniques you use on paper, you can use on fabric.

But what about the paints? Do you have to have special fabric paints? Nope, but you do need to add something to the paint if it’s not a fabric paint.

These are my regular acrylic paints with some fabric medium by Golden added to them. It’s added in a 1:1 ratio and it’s a very forgiving mixture which is handy because I don’t like to measure things.

Gel plates make stenciling easy. Just one application of paint and 3 pieces of fabric quickly had a layer of words added to them using my Words to Live By stencil.

The words are backwards on purpose. When you put a stencil with text on a gel plate, you want to place it so the words are backwards. When you take your print they’ll be facing the right way.

Whether I’m printing on paper or on fabric, the clean up prints and ghost prints are my favorites.

There’s another way to use a stencil on a gel plate. You can also put the paint on the plate first and then put the stencil on top.

This made it easy to grab parts of the stencil pattern over and over until the fabric was completely filled. This stencil is by Mary Beth Shaw from her sidewalks of Puerto Rico collection.

Thanks to an easy to follow tutorial by Melanie Ham the pieces of colorful fabric became face masks. I’m an absolute beginner when it comes to sewing and her tutorial was so easy to follow even with the pleats.

So next time you want fabric in a specific color, or pattern, or just something is uniquely yours- grab your gel plate and print your own! And I hope that you and your family are able to stay safe and healthy!

Here are the supplies used. Some of these links are affiliate links which means I get a small percentage. For example, I’m an Amazon Associate & I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra and you get a really good feeling knowing that you are helping keep the free tutorials coming!

The stir crazies are getting to me and I’m beginning to question my sanity. So I thought it would be wise to use my art supplies to administer some kind of test to evaluate where my mind’s at.

What better test than the Rorschach test, rainbow style. Rorschach tests are those ink blot tests used by psychologists, especially in the 1960s. Check out the prints below and see what appears to you in them. Wonder what our answers will say about us!

Put paint on the gel plate. Use any brand or style of acrylic paint. Put as much or as little as you want. There’s no wrong way to do it. You simply get different looks with different amounts of paint.

Then fold your gel plate in half so that the paint squishes around. When you let go, the plate will flop back to flat. I’ve used both lots of pressure on this and small amounts, and this gel plate can take it!

The plate can bend and move but the plastic protectors that come on it, they don’t bend so well. So I’ve removed them from both sides before folding the plate.

Now you’ve got a silly, fun, playful prints to take! Because there is so much paint on here, I tend to get 3-4 prints each time. If you use less paint, you get fewer pulls. If you use more paint, you’ll probably get more pulls.

Turn your prints and look at them from different angles to see different things in each one. Official Rorschach tests have a complex way of interpreting answers. We’re going to skip over that technicality and just see what we all notice in the prints.

I’m seeing circus jugglers in the prints above. One is wearing an orange skirt, and the other has a big orange collar on a silly shirt.

This print is what I imagine a brain scan on any of us would look like when we’ve got our art supplies in our hands and we’re feeling the freedom of play!

What does it say about me that I see big floppy green ears on a sitting puppy dog? Or a well dressed hippo heading out for a night on the town below?

After all the play today, I still have no idea where my mind’s at, but what I do know is that it was absolute fun to escape from the stress of what’s happening in the world right now by squishing some paint!

This is just one of the many things gel plates can do. What other types of looks can you create with them? What other supplies can you use with them? If you’re looking to have more fun with your gel plate, then take a look at my current workshops here.

Here are the supplies used. Some of these links are affiliate links which means I get a small percentage. For example, I’m an Amazon Associate & I earn from qualifying purchases. It doesn’t cost you anything extra and you get a really good feeling knowing that you are helping keep the free tutorials coming! The Plaza art colors I used are Perm. Green Light, Cerulean Blue Hue, and Cadmium Yellow Light Hue.