Homemade Stencil Play

...or fussy cutting for hours...and hours...

LOL I have to laugh at such an ambition. Sometimes I simply can't wait to see the end result of a new idea, and tend to jump in feet first before considering the amount of time it all could take.

This project had to be done in incremental steps. Details, details, details. I learned how creating a stencil is all about the little fiddly bits and details.

So I had to first find some easy-to-follow instructions at YouTube. I already knew that I had some leftover packing tape from a previous move in my hardware drawer, so that was a cinch. I'd recently finally discovered where I'd put my best cutting mat, and knew that I had new blades for my craft knife. So that seemed OK. 

What surprised me was how I gravitated toward my scissors instead. I guess that I knew how hard it might be to cut all of the curves and curls in my design as neatly using the knife as it would be to do so using my scissors.

The cutting process seemed to take forever, especially the fussier parts, and yet I'm glad that I made the effort.

Step one was a sketch which I later colored into and remade a little. I wanted it to look like curling strands of hair tossed by wind...or something like that. I can dream, right?
:)

Step Two involved fussing with the packing tape. Strips of this can (supposedly) overlap one another slightly until a surface is completely laminated. And without wrinkling. In my case, for some reason, wrinkling could not be avoided, no matter how hard I tried. The photo below does not capture every single little wrinkle in my packing tape strips. Despite that little hitch, the cutting part works out well enough so that I chose to use the stencil regardless.

So I spent a few minutes here, a half an hour there (HOURS all told), and so on, fussy cutting my brains out while listening to some music.

Due to the sheer fussiness and effort of making a first stab at creating a stencil, I neglected to make a photo record of most of the steps. In fact, I skipped everything except the two final parts, the stencil itself and the page I used it for.

Playtime Materials Included:
-a page from a drawing pad
-lots of clear packing tape (applied to both sides, and not very neatly)
-pencil, eraser, etc.
-2 sizes of scissors, one regular and one teensy
-pigment ink pad
-my Canson Field All Media spiral book
-acrylic paint
-watercolors
-previously monoprinted Canson page (see my last post)
-Mod Podge for paper
-micah powder (Perfect Pearls brand) in 2 colors, gold and white

Here's my result:

And here's how my journal looks:

(with very bad lighting--full spectrum bulb is toast)

The left hand page began as the earlier

monoprint cleanup pull mentioned

in my most recent post.

To that monoprint cleanup was added 

Mod Podge mixed with Watercolor pigment.

The page to be stenciled was painted first, then spattered using Mod Podge for a medium with Perfect Pearls to lend spotty glimmer. After the first coats had dried, I used the stencil along with my pigment ink pad in Dragonfly Black (which is a really lovely deep, dark green).

It's fun playing this way with my new journal, and I'm looking forward to this month's new Play prompt of Hardware.

:)