ArtUnwound

My most recent class for the Altenew Educator Certification Program was Celebration: Stencil Techniques, taught by Laurel Beard. As always, there was some really good information in the class.

It’s always difficult to choose which lessons to incorporate into my designs and sometimes, the decision is made for me because some of my plans just don’t work. One of the lessons was about using watercolour techniques with stencils. One of the methods, shown in the card below, worked great. The other one? Abject failure. Not once, but 3 times I tried it.

For this card, I used a piece of watercolour card, and the Leaf Bed stencil. I inked up the stencil with Forest Glade, Camomile and Tangerine Dream Fresh inks from Altenew. I then misted the stencil lightly with water and placed it over the watercolour panel. I put paper over it all and rubbed it down well to get the ink to transfer. If I try it again, I think I will leave the stencil down longer and perhaps use a brayer to push more ink into the card.

I added a flower from Vintage Garden which I had stamped onto a piece of card that I had already ink blended with various colours. The sentiment is from the Scripty Sentiments die set. I inked some white paper up with Distress Oxide Mustard Seed and die cut the sentiment 3 times and glued them together to get some dimension. The shadow was cut out of the same green cardstock used as the mat for this panel. All of this was mounted on a 5 x 6.5 inch card base.

Overall, I am really happy with this bright, sunshiny card.

The next technique I used was using a stencil with embossing or texture paste. I chose to use Distress Texture paste Sparkle, which I coloured with Altenew Fresh Ink “Be Grapeful”. I added some flowers from the Ethereal Roses stamp and die set, inked with Soft Lilac, Wisteria, Lavender Fields and Deep Iris. The leaves are Frayed Leaf and Forest Glades. The sentiment for this one comes from the One Go Birthday Greetings set. This is a great sentiment set as you can do up a bunch of them all at once and have them ready to go. The card panel and the sentiment are mounted on purple mirror card and finished off with a few sparkly gems.

You can see some of the sparkle in the texture paste in the picture above.

The class was really good in showing different ways to get more use out of your stencils. Sometimes we just go out and buy more things when we could make better use of the things we already have. I can admit, I do suffer from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) at times, but using our current stash in different ways is almost like having new stuff!

Have a glorious week, and I hope you get some time to craft or do whatever makes your heart sing!