Welcome To The DIY Gel Plate Universe

Your home base for nerdy experiments, Legit recipes, Easy Math, heroic tools and wonderful imperfection.

If you’ve ever fallen in love with gel printing … WELCOME, you’re in the right place. This could be your headquarters for all things DIY gel plates: from classic gelatin plates to vegan alternatives and hybrid “fusion” experiments. Here you’ll find recipes, nerdy deep dives, troubleshooting guides, and a calculator that does all the boring maths so you can get back to the fun part: embracing the unknown and making art. 

Choose your gel plate adventure

Commercial gel plates are amazing: you take them out of the package, they work, they last and they don’t complain. If you want plug-and-play reliability, they’re a great choice. But if you like to customize the feel of your plate, save some money, tinker with recipes, and understand what’s actually going on under the surface … the DIY route is a whole different kind of fun.

Meanwhile I created various recipes for different plates with different “personalities”. Some are bouncy, some are juicy and some are firm and some are drama queens that need a bit of extra care. In my little corner of the internet, DIY gel plates fall into two main families:

Pick the world you’re curious about or explore both:

classic

A familiar recipe, with room to experiment

This is where my DIY gel plate adventure began: a gelatin-based plate that I could make myself, adjust to my favourite size and use again and again.

My original recipe uses gelatin, water, glycerin and alcohol. (15g gelatin, 50ml water, 25ml glycerin, 25ml alcohol) In the updated version, I use propylene glycol instead of alcohol.

The videos below walk you through the original recipe and the making process, the updated version and tipps & tricks about maintenance.

The DIY Gel Plate Recipe Calculator 2.0 down below handles the amounts for your chosen plate size, so you can spend less time doing maths and more time making glorious, wonderfully unpredictable prints.

vegan

A different kind of squishy

Can you make a useful gel printing plate without gelatin? That question has led me through 148 test plates (so far) and quite a few unexpected turns.

I’ve been exploring ingredients such as agar, carrageenan and sodium alginate, looking at how the plates feel, how they hold up and, most importantly, how well they print.

Some need more patience than others. Some promising ideas don’t survive long-term testing. And sometimes a surprisingly simple recipe outperforms a much more complicated one.

This part of the DIY Gel Plate Universe is still growing. I’m working towards practical recipes and clear instructions, including the quirks and trade-offs that help you choose a plate that suits the way you like to print.

DIY Gel Plate Recipe Calculator 2.0
(no alcohol)

cm inch
If you’re using standard gelatine from the supermarket and there is no Bloom value on the package, choose “I don’t know”. The calculator will assume about 200 Bloom - that’s what the original recipe was based on. If your Bloom value isn’t listed, just pick the closest one - the difference is usually small and the plate will still work.
Plate style / recipe:
Polyols = glycerin + propylene glycol. “Fusion” uses my experimental recipe that combines gelatine with konjac or xanthan hydrogel.
Ingredients for your plate:
These values are approximate. It’s absolutely fine to round to what your scale can measure.

Fuel the next experiment

If this calculator has saved you some maths, a few ingredients or a mild kitchen disaster, you can help keep the experiments going with a coffee on Ko-fi.

Your support helps me buy ingredients, test new ideas and turn the results into useful recipes, videos and tools for fellow curious makers.

Thank you for helping this wonderfully imperfect little universe grow.