What you can do with just one stencil design

Using my ‘Tangled Branches’ mask on drop cloth

I am obsessed with stencils!

I draw them, I cut them by hand sometimes, but usually they get cut by machine. There are a few brands available right now, I started with a Silhouette Cameo a few years ago now.

I have often thought about all the things I do with stencils. Many years ago I cut all my stencils and masks by hand. Mainly used for enamelling, etching and roller printing in jewellery in those days, now I find myself having scaled up to larger work and trying things on lots of materials I had not used for art before.

In this post I am going to share with you a record I want to keep, just to see how many different techniques and materials I can use my stencils for. I am going to keep adding to this post whenever a new technique or material is used. I hope you’ll enjoy watching my journey and come along for the ride!

The initial drawing imported into the Silhouette Studio software

This design came from a tree that grew in our previous garden, it is unusual in that it loses its leaves seasonally, not a common thing in trees where I live. I took some photos of the tracery of the branches and then used those to create my first masks, which were fairly fine and detailed at the start. I used them for etching and enamelling jewellery at the time.

Now I find myself using them at a larger scale, which is something you can do very easily in the cutter’s software, just using a portion of the all over design. 

The Silhouette Cameo cutting file

Having your own cutter gives you so much freedom, especially these days where it is so easy to get a design into the cutter. My friend has a Cricut and although she’s not to most tech-savvie she has absolutely no problems using it.

I’m starting with something I’m working on at the moment, using one of my very favourite stencils called ‘Tangled Branches’.
I hope to have this set for sale as a download soon as masks, which are ready, and stencils which I’m still working on.

Using the 'Tangled Branches' mask
on drop cloth

I love the graphic quality to these branches, no matter how I use it. I have gelli printed it on my mobile papers as well, using small sections of the design, but this week I stencilled on a piece of drop cloth I am going to use to make a large casual bag.
A drop cloth is what painters use, it’s a heavy cotton material which I washed and ironed before I used it. 

In this case, I used the mask, which gives me a lot of colour in the negative areas, as opposed to a stencil which would give me the colour in the lines.

I’ve used the rounded makeup sponges I love, they are very cheap on eBay, and the paint is one of my favourite colours ‘Atelier Interactive Blue Black (Indigo’) in this case I have not added a fabric medium to the paint as it is going to be an art bag aI will wash it as is. It will be able to go in the washing machine and even if the print does not survive forever it’ll be long enough for me.