Thursday, December 1, 2022

 Here is where I believe I bought the lacy doily starring in my first Christmas card of the day. However, a quick check has shown that this specific design is no longer available there.  However! Type "paper doilies" into your browser and one click will bring up more sizes, designs and colors than you ever could have envisioned for lacy papers!


L791 Palm Fronds Silhouettes Large is one mask among others that I used with heavy body red acrylic paint in printing a large sheet of paper that later got fed to the scissors.  One remaining scrap peeked up at me from the haphazard pile, begging to become a candle on a Christmas card. So:






The remainder of today's Christmas cards came from thinking outside the box ... using un-Christmassy-looking stencils with a several types of media, including glitter glue for highlights, on dark bronze backgrounds.  If I'd had a do-over, I would have chosen a deep dark royal blue for the backgrounds.






The card above was made with heavy body silver metallic acrylic paint my 6"x 6" stencil Budding Branches s249.





The above Christmas card was made with coarse modeling paste and my 6"x 6" stencil Swaying Grasses s276.






The above card was made with part of my 9" x 12" stencil Queen Anne's Lace L229.


My approach to the card made with a portion of Queen Anne's Lace L229, was to spray acrylic paint thru the stencil openings.  Since this stencil measures 9"x 12", I masked off portions of it before using the spray.

For spraying this particular card, I chose the old-fashioned way of creating my own custom blended colors for spraying.  I use small spray bottles bought at drug stores' traveling supplies section or at art supply stores.  I fill them with a mix of acrylic liquid paint, water and airbrush medium.  The ratio of water to acrylic liquid paint varies, depending on whether I want to end up with a heavy spray or a light one.  The amount of airbrush medium never varies -- it's always just a few drops per spray bottle.  I clean the spray nozzles after each use.  But if they clog between uses, anyway, then I use rubbing alcohol to clear them.








At times, I fall back on the old way of preparing spray paints that's detailed above; it's less convenient but less expensive than my newer approach.

This newcomer calls for the same spray bottles, but they are filled with Golden High Flow Acrylics.  

The high flows resemble color inks but they are pigment-based whereas I'm told that many inks are dye-based.  I've worked with inks but my personal preference is for high flows.

Now that Golden has released a huge number of new color blends in their high flow line, there's much less need for making my own custom mixes.  I can still use an eye-dropper to alter tones among the Golden color blends, but for the most part they've done the work for me.  I don't get paid to say this, but I love these thin paints from Golden and I love that it's a 100 percent employee-owned company.  Kudos to them!

Check with the Postal Service before mailing greeting cards if yours, like mine, are of "unusual" size; there's a "non-machinable" surcharge for sending some sizes.

Thanks for visiting my blog!  To scroll through the pages of my stencils and masks at StencilGirlProducts.com, please start 
here.

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