Texture of the Week: Plastic Straw Plate
During the early phase on the pandemic I was searching all over for projects to keep my son engaged during "Mom School". It was a pretty crazy time and I don't remember much, but we had some good times trying to design our own money and create which my son hated! We still laugh about that one.
(Also, a big thank you to all the art, history, and science museums with educational project ideas on their websites, seriously it was very helpful.)
One project involved plastic straws cut into thirds, with small slits on each end, and a pack of playing cards. It was sort of like a D.I.Y. tinker toy thing. I think it took me longer to cut up the straws, than it kept my son engaged, but I was trying lots of ideas.
When we were done, I didn't want to just dump the straw bits in the garbage, that's not my style. I don't like unnecessary waste and I am always looking for ways to repurpose trash for printing texture.
I eventually found that they made interesting marks/lines when combined. And, I finally used up the whole cup of straw bits on a recently finished batch of texture plates.
To make each plate:
- I cut a piece of cardboard
- Spread a layer of soft gel gloss (or something similar for glue) using a palette knife.
- Arranged straw pieces on top and waited for it to dry.
The first print I made I shows two ways to use this tool on the plate.
- You can roll out paint and then try to remove some with the texture tool
- Or you can stamp the plate with a texture tool loaded with paint from some other source.
One thing to note is that fresh plastic tools, perform much like fresh plastic stencils. They resist picking up much wet paint, so the marks created when trying to stamp into the paint on the gel plate are fairly subtle.
This may change a bit over time, as the tool builds up a layer of paint, OR you can wait till the paint gets a little tacky/sticky.
Here's a photo of my gel plate after the paint had been sitting for at least 30 seconds before I started stamping. The straw texture plate was still new, but the paint was getting tacky, so the tool was able to pull a lot more off.
I also found that stamping the straw plates directly onto paper left some really nice marks.
What do you think?
