Small Stencils Make a Big Impact

Hi there, it's Tuesday so it must be Artistcellar stencil day!  Today I'm going to show you how many stencils I used on a small 4" by 4" canvas to make a huge impact.  The stamped teacup looks like the star of the show but without the stencils it would be pretty boring.  This started out as an Art Card experiment and ended up as a small canvas.  I have been hearing and reading about these new tiles called Art Cards, they measure 4" by 4" and remind me of ATCs.  Tiny surfaces packed with all sorts of colors and ephemera.  I'll walk you through my process.  CAUTION:  heavy use of photography!

I began by using a piece of an existing master board, that way I didn't have to face a blank canvas.  This gives the piece a background and a few colors to work with.  I just cut off a 4" by 4" piece of the master board made last week on 140# water color paper.

I used a stamp that had a lot of open space, this one is called "Teacup" by B Line Designs.  When stamping on water color paper I use Jet Black StazOn ink and really get a lot of ink on the stamp before stamping.

I collect old tea cups and none of them match.  I thought I'd do the same thing here and make a series of these using different colors and stencils so none of the cups match.  This is the first one.  I brought in one of the Sacred Hearts stencils; this one is called "Immaculate".  Using a Micron 01 Black pen I stenciled the rose on the top half of the cup and the beams of light on the lower half.  The stencil can be moved repeatedly to get the desired design.

I added color to the design with Dylusions inks that had been poured into a water brush pen. Now rather than spray the inks I can paint them on very specifically.

First I painted the Bubblegum Pink ink then Fresh Lime and Vibrant Turquoise.  I added yellow with a Memento Marker in Dandelion.

Next I used stencils again, this time for the background.  All of the stencils are 6" by 6" and are called X's from the Marked Series, Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's Circles in Lines and Fire Coral from the Coral Series.  I just layered one after the other and used different inks chosen from the above four colors.

I stamped a phrase from Dylusions, cut out the portion I wanted and edged it in the Turquoise ink.  Then I glued it to the watercolor panel and inked the edges of the paper.

The tea bag was created from a tiny tag stamped with stamp from Rubber Stamp Tapestry and attached to a piece of twine.  The tag was glued to the panel.

I used an irRESISTible Pico Embellisher in Shimmer to highlight areas of the teacup and the phrase.  It spreads easily with the needle-like tip and looks like liquid plastic when it dries.  When everything had dried I used a strong adhesive to glue the water color panel to a 4" by 4" by 3/4" canvas that I bought a Michaels.

That's it for today.  This was a fun project, didn't take very much time to make and challenged me to use stencils in different ways.  I will see you next Tuesday with more ideas on how to use stencils in your artwork.  Hugs~  Renee

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