Opaque vs Transparent Paint for Gel Printing: A Quick Guide

What do opaque and transparent mean?

Compare that to this lovely ceramic vase.
It's solid - you can’t see through it.
That’s opaque.

A really quick way to see if your paint is opaque or transparent (so you know how it's going to react) is to test it on a piece of black paper.

Here, I’m testing some tubes of acrylic paint by Golden Paints. 
Their labels make it really easy to figure out transparency.

See that small black square on the label of this Teal paint? 
That means it’s opaque.

However ... if the square is empty, like it is on this tube of Phthalo Blue, it means the paint is transparent.

If the square is half-filled in, like it is on this tube of Titan Buff, it’s a semi-transparent paint.

Other paint brand labels can be a bit more confusing. Take this DYNA paint by Pebeo Studio Acrylics, for example. 

It’s metallic and reflective, but the label doesn’t say if it’s transparent or not.

If you’re unsure, a little test on a piece of black paper will give you a good idea.

Here, I’ve applied a thin layer, and you can see it’s quite transparent - you can clearly see the writing underneath the paint.

Yellow paints tend to be quite transparent too. Even so, they really pop on dark surfaces. 

The black paper test is a quick, easy way to really help you understand how the paint you're using is going to work.

Print 1

Now I’ll lay some leaves on top of the paint layer to create a silhouette.

I'm going to use one of my favourite papers, Carnival wet strength tissue. 
It’s brilliant, especially if you're building up layers, because it won't rip or tear and it picks up loads of detail.

I’ll give it a wipe with my hand to smooth it out and make sure it’s had good contact with the paint, especially around the leaves, before gently peeling it back. 

It's a warm summer day here at the studio. The paint’s drying pretty fast, so I remove the leaves right away.

Then I lay down a fresh bit of paper, give it a gentle smooth with my hand, and lift it off.

That one didn’t pull much, but that’s okay. We can use this as a base layer for another print. 

Next up, I’m using Golden’s Phthalo Blue (Green Shade), another transparent colour that’s perfect for layering.

I roll out a nice thin coat on the gel plate, just like before, and place some more of my botanicals on top.

Now I’m going back to that first print we did and placing it over the plate again to start building up some layers.

I gently smooth it out and then carefully peel it back.

You can see we’re getting a lovely green colour coming through because the blue and yellow are mixing.

It’s almost like screen printing in that way: when you’re working with transparent colours, they blend beautifully, right there on the print.

Now I’ll gently remove the leaves.  This time I want to layer a bit of yellow over the leaf imprints.

It should give us more of that lovely fresh green colour.

I’m using a clean sheet of paper for this pull so I have a better chance of lifting off all the paint from the plate.

That’s quite nice!  You can really start to see those lovely layers building up now.

That’s the magic of transparent paint!

Tip: Pop your tissue over a piece of plain white paper - it makes the print a bit easier to see.

Print 2

I’m going to roll out a thin, even layer.

This time, I’m not adding any plants. I just want it to act like a wash of colour that softens and blends what’s already there.

Now I place my print down on the plate, and gently press, especially over those white areas I want to tone down.

This glazing technique helps to build up those transparent layers, without covering up what’s underneath.

Cleaning off the Gel Plate:

There's still a lot of leftover paint on the roller, so I do one more pass on the gel plate.

I pull that up too, again using tissue.

These grungy underlayers are some of my favourites!  They give such beautiful texture and make great bases to build on later.

Now that my plate’s clean, I’m going in with a layer of Titan Pale Green, an opaque colour.

It's also a Golden Open Acrylic, which means it has a slower dry time, giving me a bit more time to work.

Because it’s opaque, it’ll completely block out some areas of the print, so you’ll really see the difference compared to the transparent paints we’ve used so far.

I'm just rolling out a thin layer across the gel plate, and then placing a few more botanicals to fill the space.

Then I take my earlier print and lay it carefully over top of the opaque paint.

I press gently, especially around the leaves, to get a nice clean silhouette.

Now for the reveal!

You can really see that opaque Titan Green layer sitting on top. Any areas where it touched the paper are fully covered, but in the open spaces, all those lovely transparent layers still peek through.

Print 3

When you put them side by side, it’s hard to believe these three prints were made using the same materials!

I used the same gel plate, the same paper, the same botanicals, and even the same paints - just layered and used in different ways.

It really shows how much variety you can get simply by playing with transparent and opaque colours.