Stenciling Tutorial!!

Hey all! I'm back with you guys again today, and a lot earlier than yesterday, if I do say so myself. :) I'm really excited to share this tutorial with you guys, as I've sort of been keeping you guys in anticipation. I guess I've left you hanging long enough. Let's get started, shall we? We're going to start this tutorial off with a background. For the purposes of this tutorial, as I wanted it to be mainly about stenciling, I did not walk you through the steps of making said background. But this can be anything. Personally I like to look for very simple, linear designs that just look like they could use a little bit of spicing up. I looked through my journal, and this page really called to me. Very simplistic, but I love the colors of it. They're so cool.

The next thing that you're going to do is to try out a couple of different stencils. I flipped through lots of my stencils, and laid them over top of the background so I could sort of get a feel for what the finished stenciling would look like on the page. I looked at two stencils; a sun looking one, and my favorite; the flower. I would have used the flowers, but I really liked the way the suns looked. They sort of worked with the whole color scheme of the page. I know that sounds weird, but shapes CAN relate to the color scheme of the page. If you stencil the wrong thing, then you could EASILY end up "ruining" the page, or, at the very least, ending up with an ugly layer. And I tend to like to avoid those layers if at all possible. Now you're going to choose a color to stencil in. I didn't photograph this part, mostly because I didn't know how to. I thought about using a black, but it ended up it would have looked too harsh. Then I looked at a burgundy color, but that was too bright. I ended up mixing a bit of black with the burgundy to come up with mahogany.

Next you're going to take a paintbrush and paint around the edges of the larger segments of the stencil.

Then you can fill in the rest of the space with the paint.

And then the rest of the large areas.

After that you can simply fill in the rest of the spaces with the paint and peel up the stencil. This is a really grungy method of stenciling, and since that's my style it doesn't really matter to me. If you want, you can be a lot more careful, but the steps are done exactly the same way. I hope that you guys liked today's tutorial, and I'll see you guys later!