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From the pages of Threads Magazine Stenciling in a nutshell
Stenciling takes very little paint. Spoon just a bit of each color you want onto your plate, wad the sponge into a ball and touch it to one or more colors, then dab repeatedly onto a clean part of the plate in order to mix the colors and cover the sponge evenly. (If you're working with heavy fabrics, you may want to slightly dampen the sponge beforehand, but be sure to squeeze it in a towel until it's almost dry.) Holding the stencil gently but firmly on top of the fabric or garment (you might try pinning it down if you're covering a large area), pat firmly through the holes, leaving a light layer of paint behind. Notice that you can easily build up more paint in some areas than others, which can create exciting variations. Smooth fabrics print the sharpest outlines and clearest details with the least paint, but for best results, always print lightly, building up multiple layers if you want more coverage. To get the brightest colors on darker fabrics, try printing first with white paint, letting it dry, then adding colored layers. Try printing over both wet and dry layers of paint, and adding more or less water to both thin and soften the colors and blur the edges you leave. When the paint dries, set it with heat from an iron so it can withstand washing or dry-cleaning, as described in the instructions that come with the paint. Most of the paint will lift off the stencils after soaking in warm water (pat, don't rub, between paper towels), but they don't have to be spotlessly clean before using them again. That's it for instructions! Everything else is just variations and imagination, as you'll soon see. Layering stencils for effect The focus of my current approach to stenciling is exploring how wide a range of effects I can get as I apply paint to fabric. Layering and the other techniques I'll discuss are a few of the most provocative ideas I've come up with. I hope you'll enjoy experimenting with them as much as I have.
The easiest way to start layering is simply to place another stencil over one you've just printed through, before you shift the first one, then printing again with a contrasting color, as in the example in the photo above. Print lightly each time, so the resulting layers don't build up excessively. If you want to plan the framing effect beforehand, you can hold the framing stencil up to the light and move other stencils over it until you like the effect. Then lay both stencils down together and print. You can either print through each stencil successively, as described above, or print through both layers at once, which will show just the cut-off or masked version of the stencil with the smaller holes. As I caught on to the possibilities of layering, I began to assemble a collection of basic shapes, which I use to frame or mask other, usually more complex, stencils. [ previous ] [ next ] |
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