Birthday Ferns – Monoprinting Technique

“Must-Try Monoprinting” was one of the lessons offered in the Spring Card Camp 2 online cardmaking class.  What is cool about this technique is that the “same ink” applied to a gel plate can be used to make two (or more) card panels.

I tried the techniques Dawn showed in her lesson and added a few variations of my own.  And while the class included more detailed instructions along with suggestions for alternate tools and supplies that could be used for this technique, here is a very brief summary of what I did to create my cards:

First, I applied ink to my gel plate (I used Broken China, Faded Jeans, and Peeled Paint Distress Oxide inks) and blended the colors with a brayer.   I then rolled the brayer onto a piece of card stock to clean it; no sense wasting all that ink!  I ended up with an inked panel that I was able to use for this card:

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Next, I “removed” ink from the gel plate with a stamp (kissing technique) and stamped the image onto a second piece of card stock. I used the “Three Ferns” (S5154) stamp from Hero Arts and repeated the kissing and stamping several times (cleaning the stamp between each repetition) to create the panel for this next card.

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Now for the monoprinting – I placed a third piece of card stock on the gel plate to transfer the ink that was left from the previous step.  (The “Hello Topper” die is by Birch Press Designs.)

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My stamp still has some ink on it so I spritzed it with water and stamped on a fourth piece of card stock.  To clean the gel plate, I spritzed water over it and “smooshed” a fifth panel onto the wet ink before wiping it clean/dry.  I used both panels on this next card:

FIVE panels/FOUR cards from a single inking!

I tried this technique several times (it’s very addicting), and in some cases, there was enough ink on the stamp and/or gel plate to get even more panels!  (The card shown at the top of this post was made from one of these later tries and was trimmed to create a 4 1/4 inch square card.)

Thanks for checking out my card projects!

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