Once Upon A Dream

Hi everybody! I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and New Year. I was so busy I didn't have time to post anything I made!  Have to catch up on that later. For now, here is a quick post of a piece I just threw together after being inspired by watching my favorite Disney movie, Sleeping Beauty. I credit that movie with instilling in me a love of medieval style, because the design of the film is doused in medieval sauce, and as a toddler I watched it three times a day. I watched it again this morning and got this idea which marinated in my head all day. So here it is, with some closeup shots too, to show the pencilled details. 

(I couldn't help myself, had to put a tiny caterpillar on one of the leaves.)

The whole thing was done with Michelle Ward stencils and cheap acrylic paint. 

Thursday Theme: Stencil Madness!

So, since this is my blog and I make the rules, I feel compelled to say that sometimes, Thursday's Theme will be quite general, which means that some themes may repeat over time.  It's always worth revisiting themes from time to time anyway, because at different times you might see the same thing differently and do something different with it.  As an example, I've recently been playing with stencils (and masks) more because I've been getting more of Michelle Ward's fabulous stencils.  But the way I use them has been evolving a little bit, and I'm starting to play with new ideas.  So here's a brief tour of some of the things you can do with stencils, starting with some older work.

Way back, I started with one of Michelle's Street Team Crusades, where she encouraged us to cut our own stencils and masks.  Not one to ever start with something easy, I did this:

It's a lion mask within a lion stencil within a shield mask.

 

 



I used it in the traditional way, pouncing paint through it and around it, which was cool but very static.  And then I didn't do much with stencils for a long while.  I occasionally used masks with my inks and sprays, but not a whole lot.  I did a couple of things with paint, trying to use Michelle's drybrushing techniques and usually ending up with too much paint, like this:

 

 

 

 

Last Summer I got to take two fabulous classes with Michelle.  And we did a lot with her new stencils, and we cut our own.  And I was hooked.  The techniques I had tried to learn from her blog finally clicked. 

 

 

 And once I came home, I decided to experiment a little more with layering and monoprinting with the painty side of the stencil, and that's how I did this:

The coolest part of this was painting a gray background and laying a stencil over it, then wiping through the stencil with a damp paper towel.  That's how I got the lightest crosses.  It's actually the blank canvas showing through.

 

I've gotten more adventurous with my experiments, hence the messy mushroom canvas and the Halloween tags:

 

Big mushroom masks cut from manila folders, layered with Michelle's quatrefoil stencil for spots.

Laid down a background, embossed through the stencil with clear embossing powder, and then darkened the tag, which the embossing resisted.

And Christmas was a great opportunity to use portions of stencils, and layer inks and sprays through them:

 

But all this time, I've been forgetting something that Michelle taught us in the classes.  You can still draw through stencils.  Remember when you were a kid, and you learned how to use stencils, and you traced the shapes through them?  Or was that just me?  Anyway, that's still a perfectly good way to use a stencil.  So in the previous post you saw Mom's gift tag, where I started to remember that.  This week, I spent some time with some stencils, a pencil, a Micron pen, and two Sharpies.  Here are my experiments.  I like the third one best.

 

 

 

What's cool is, it was a really simple way to test some layering ideas, and now I have some patterns that I can translate into ink or paint and still retain as much or as little of the pencil/pen/marker features as I want.  The hash mark fill-in from the first one of these was kind of fun, and I can see where that might be useful in some compositions.  But I loved mixing some filled in spaces with some outlined spaces like in the second and third photos.  There's lots to play with here, and I have the feeling that the more I play, the more I'll discover.

 

When's the last time you played with stencils?  Do you have some particular favorites?  Do  you make your own, or purchase them, or both?

Let the Wind Carry You Home

I hadn't worked on much in a little while, except a couple of tags for a friend's baby shower, but there's an idea that had been poking at me for a while, ever since I found black-primed canvases at Michael's.

I knew I wanted to use it for a project based on the Alter Bridge song Blackbird.  I love Alter Bridge.  They've really become my favorite band.  To be honest, I liked them on the radio but never really followed them until I realized that Edge, one of my favorite wrestlers, entered the ring to one of their songs.  I'm glad I noticed.  They're one of those bands whose albums surpass their singles.  When Edge suddenly had to retire or else risk paralysis or death, I started to think of their song Blackbird as his new theme.  It's possibly their best track, but I'll let them speak for themselves:

(I always think Myles' vocals are a little weird live, but still... Note the Beatles homage at the beginning and the totally sweet Tremonti Series PRS Guitars - a Maryland guitar company :) )

So....

I had sort of started the project a good while ago, but wasn't happy with what I was getting.  Trying to stamp on stretched canvas is pretty hard, especially when it's not stretched very taut.  So I had walked away from my sloppy gothic text stamping with Michelle Ward's Printed Matter stamps and let it sit there for a while.  But this weekend, I finally followed through with what I wanted to do.  At worst, I'd have to paint black over it and start over, right?

 First things first, I needed a custom mask.  So I printed out the image I wanted (the blackbird from the Blackbird album cover) and stuck some Tim Holtz mask material (I like it cos it's already sticky on the back) on it and started cutting.  And why cut a mask and discard the rest of the material?  So I was careful to not make any extra cuts so I could have a stencil too. 

Yeah, that little guy was a beeotch and a half to cut out.  But so, so worth it.  Because I peeled off the paper, stuck him down where I wanted him on the canvas (ok so the sticky didn't so much stick, but it worked well enough), and swiped over him with some silver paint.  And some red paint.  And some black paint.  And I'm pleased with the result.

It's the first piece of Alter Bridge inspired art that I've finished.  I've got another project that's been sitting half-done for a while that I need to get back to.  I just need to fit it in between the dancing and the mending and the just being too tired to do anything but sit and play video games after work. 

Just because everything's changing doesn't mean it's never been this way before...

(Post title from the same song as the previous post title.)

So I finally have pics of the new and improved Narnia Jeans!





Sorry the lighting is kinda sucky. I was at trivia, and Pam's hubby was kind enough to take the pics but no amount of photo-fu can turn crappy lighting and a mediocre camera into professional conditions. Anyway, I'm actually happier with the re-paint than with the original. Don't know if you can tell the difference from the pictures, but I can see it. They're better this time.

The Narnia Exhibition was FANTASTIC. It was just magical. OMG seeing those costumes up close! Or as close as I could get to the glass, at least. Isis Mussenden is my new hero. The detail in the costumes is just incredible. Also, Tumnus' scarf is not just k1sl1/purl, because it definitely has knit v's on the wrong side too. So I have no clue what it is. I'm just gonna be happy with mine for now. I can't justify doing a third Tumnus scarf. Well, I'm sure if I really tried I could, but I won't... Anyway, I hope the exhibition comes somewhere closer because I would LOVE to go again. If it comes near you, go. It's definitely worth the trip.

I'm seriously itching to MAKE STUFF and it's killing me because I've got homework and the basement craft room is a colossal mess (yes, still) and there's just so much to do before I can really justify sitting down and playing. Argh!

By the Lion!

Oops. My, time did fly past this month, didn't it? Here it is, last day of the month again, and I'm just now posting my GPP Crusade entry. And I apologize, fellow Crusaders; I haven't kept up with everybody else's entries either. Only read a few of them so far.

This month's crusade assignment was stencil cutting. OMG. Michelle is such an enabler. I mean, there are worse things to be addicted to, true, but really, how many addictions does she think we can handle?

For my stencil, I decided to go with a Narnian theme. Gee I wonder why. Anyway, what came to mind was Peter's shield, the one that Father Christmas gives him. "The shield was the color of silver and across it there ramped a red lion, as bright as a ripe strawberry at the moment when you pick it." The shield of the kings of Narnia.

And of course I couldn't do something easy and/or conventional. That wouldn't be any fun. But more on that later...

So I dug out my little Dover heraldry book that I've had since the 6th grade, enlarged a lion rampant and a shield, and lo, I had my design. So I got a slab of glass that Mom happened to have lying about from our days of experimenting with polymer clay, dug out some quilter's template, and opened my brand-new handy-dandy little stencil burning tool, popped in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe DVD, and set to work.



The design:

See all those little points? Why I do this to myself remains a mystery.

Step 1, the Lion:

All those little black spots are where the stencil burner actually, well, burned the quilter's template. Apparently that stuff's not as hardy as it looks. Works, though.

After cutting out the Lion, I then cut the outline of the shield. This way, the shield with the Lion cut out of the middle would be a combination mask+stencil, with the additional Lion mask that came out of the middle of the shield. (Was that coherent?) Two pieces of plastic = two masks + one stencil. w00ties! My master plan. I'm sure someone somewhere has done this before me. But I didn't know about them, so I'm gonna claim it as my idea. *plants flag*
Dum-dum (that's me) didn't take a pic of the shield before actually using them, so you only get to see its shape after it's been doused with paint. These, and others, to be precise:


The results of which are such:

The one at the far left bottom had the Lion mask laid down and the paper spritzed with copper Shimmer Mist, then the mask peeled up and the shield laid down and pounced with red acrylic paint on a sponge. The middle top one was the same sequence, with gold and red acrylic paints applied by sponge. The far right was also the same sequence, with acrylics and Shiva Paintsticks sponged on.

And yes, I know, it's supposed to be silver, not gold. Gold shows up better and I like the way it looks with red. And copper is just what we happened to have in the Shimmer Mist. Oh well.

With the Lion laid back into the stencil after all that painting, it looks like this:

Pretty spiff, no?

Anyway, I have now purchased some spray fabric paint, and have grand plans for this stencil. I'm also resisting the urge to stencil it on EVERYTHING I OWN.

Me? Obsessive? Nah. Well, maybe a little.

And...
Coming Soon to a Pocket Near You: The Chronicles of a Narnia Scarf