You can take trash, like the lids from water bottles, paints, cosmetics, or anything you have to make circular patterns on your Gel Press plates! You’ll see how using up every last little bit of paint gives you the ability to create the varied layers on some of these tags!

The tool used to make this pattern is just a bunch of lids glued to a piece of cardboard. You can use any lids you have from the orange juice jug or the cap from a finished tube of paint or a water bottle cap or the lid from your used up cosmetics. Keep an eye out in your trash or recycle bin for those circles!

Gather a bunch of lids then find the ones that are all the same height. I keep a bag around to collect these in and when it gets full, I pull out all the ones of similar heights to create a gel printing tool.

The variety in these tags is from using up every last bit of paint on the plate. That’s how the grungy layers were created.

If you have a paint that is older or starting to thicken up, it may do something like this. This tube of purple paint is near the end and it’s old so those two factors lead it to not spread as evenly or smoothly as younger paint.

If you ever have older paints, give them a try on your gel plate- it just might give you a cool speckled color variation like this purple did!

Creating all this variety was fast and each and every tag is one of a kind! This is just one of the ways you can use a Gel Press plate- if you’re looking for more ideas check out my page of gel printing resources!

There was a plan in my head when this began and it didn’t take long before the plan was abandoned. Generally, when things don’t go as planned, they turn out way better than I was expecting but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some rough moments along the way.

Those rough and ugly moments are all O.O.P.S.ies, Outstanding Opportunities Presenting Suddenly. Speaking of ugly, you can see how the background was created was created in the video, Ugly Can Be A Good Thing.

The plan started out by stenciling three silhouettes from my Dance of This Life stencil from StencilGirl.

You can cannibalize letters from your word stencils to create other words. Even though I didn’t have the exact word I wanted on my Uplifting Words stencil, I had all the letters!

Putting a Post It note around a letter makes it easy to stencil just that letter.

The meaning of this page shifted significantly from what I had planned. I expected it to be about being seen, revealing yourself just a little bit but then it shifted to faith. Faith in the process, in trusting your instincts, trusting through the ugly layers, and most of all having faith in the O.O.P.S.ies

This was in an art journal but that doesn’t mean it has to stay there. I was loving this so much I wanted to be able to put it up on the wall.

So I did! I simply cut out the part I loved and mounted it onto a wood panel. Even if something starts out in a journal doesn’t mean it has to stay there!