Righto; Week 1 of 52 over and done with. When I embarked on this project on January 1st I was honestly a bit worried that it would be another bright-idea-when-your’e-hungover-the-day-after-new-year’s-eve sort of thingy. Sure, it’s only been a week, but on the other hand I could have quit on day two…
So, the prompt for day seven: Make and use a stencil.
My first thought was that this felt very trendy. But also very retro. Making your own stencils and using them for collages or prints on textile was very popular when I was a kid. Then it sort of got a bit goofy. But now it’s trending again, and there are a lot of beautiful stencils made by popular brands today. Tim Holtz is a good example. And it’s sort of being taken to the next step.
Well, I haven’t done anything like it in a long while, and certainly not by using any cool techniques, but since one of the purposes with this 365 project is to learn a lot of new stuff, this was sort of perfect, I think.
I’ve been following Julie Balzer for a while, very talented mixed media artist with loads of great ideas and designs. She made this excellent tutorial that I found only a couple of days ago. Go check it out and don’t forget to give some thumbs up:
This was perfect for this prompt for several reasons.
- I got to use up some of the plain tags from my stash, that I bought many years ago
- I got to practice using my distress inks and my blender tool
- I got to mess about with sprays and mists
- And i now have several pretty tags to use for gifties in the future. Yay!
So, I went ahead and prepared two stencils, as prompted. I drew and cut them out by hand. The first one similar to the one in the tutorial:
I followed the tutorial as best as I could, and the result felt very rewarding. You can’t see it on the photo, but on the purple one it says “Nobody Rains on Your Parade”:
Also I made this stencil with hearts on it. It’s not long before Valentines, after all:
I tried some different inks, colours and sprays, loads of fun! You really should give it a try:
In the end I think I ended up using distress inks and stains, chalks, watercolours, mists and color wash. Oh, and some stamps and water resistant stamp pads of different varieties. I also tried using a little leafy twig as a stencil, sort of. But since the result got kind of fuzzy I drew a pattern on top with some Sakura pens. I might add some more details later, or maybe an embellishment.
And that was day 7. Out of 365. Ouff…
Stay safe everyone, thanks for stopping by!
