Quick Texture with Stencils

The following is a guest post I did over on the Artistcellar blog a few months ago.

My brain is rapidly slowing down as SPRING BREAK approaches and I fear I will fall over as I teach Kinders the wonders of Still Lifes in the few days left before sweet freedom(!) and road trips(!!) arrives. Is that how you are feeling too, my fellow creatives? It is during these times where I need a simple project to rock my world and give my creativity a boost towards ACTUALLY MAKING THINGS. I explain all this to you to set the scene for a recent discovery of mine.

In my quest to use stencils in ways different from my usual I stumbled upon an awesome texture technique that I am convinced someone has already discovered. Since I don't see it taking the crafty blogiverse by storm I must deduce that that someone lacked the proper publicity skillz to get this out into the world where it can grow and marry and make beautiful texture babies.

Ahem.

So I will step forth and do what needs to be done. Listen carefully....

Grab your art journal, a brayer, some Dina Wakley acrylics, a paint palette, Golden Acrylic glazing liquid and some rad stencils. The ones I used here are Artistcellar's Sacred Geometry 2 and the map ones.

Squeeze a little bit of paint and glazing liquid onto the palette and use your brayer to mix it up and smooth it out. When your brayer is evenly inked grab a stencil and carefully roll the brayer over it once or twice. Now, lay aside your stencil and roll your brayer onto a blank page in your art journal.

TA-DAAAA!

With some of the ink transferring onto the stencil and off of the brayer it is like monoprinting where the brayer is your plate. HAVE I BLOWN YOUR MIND YET?

And using a dark color onto a pre-painted surface is just divine. Check out this teal background with texture applied with Dina's Night acrylic paint rolled on with a brayer. YUM!

The results are random and depends on how many times you roll your brayer onto the stencil. Want a clear pattern? Only roll your brayer one revolution over your stencil. Want more "layers"? Roll a few times onto your stencil in two different places.

I am not sure if my excitement over this little texture tidbit is a result of my tired educator mind or the thrill of Spring in the air but I can assure you that it is fun and gives mad texture with very little effort.



So, go ahead and try it out and let me know what you think.

Go forth and create, my friends!