Stencils Meet Collage

Stencils and collage?  So glad you asked!

Ivy Frame 6, a 6" x 6" stencil, struck me as a good way to embellish the collage below.  Its bottom layer is a Gelli Plate print.  Over that, I developed a collage using red-orange paper, blue-green-yellow mottled paper and foreign script from an old book. Next came the big blue oval, painted with matte medium-diluted acrylic paint.  (Some artists dilute acrylics with water; I use a colorless liquid medium instead, usually opting for matte rather than glossy.)

Last, I added a crown of ivy using dark green acrylic paint.     

Ivy Frame 6 itself looks like this--

Below is a simple collage that incorporates a background paper that I made with acrylic paint and a scraper.  Using a stencil in this way is shown this video of mine.  The stencil used here was my 6" x 6" Kalied.  

Kalied itself looks like this --

Still a different approach to the marriage of stencils and collage is a simple one:  Make a lot of stencil-prints using assorted colors and papers.  Then cut up the papers and combine them.  Each of the collage pieces below was cut from a print made with Garden Montage, a 9" x 11" mask.

Garden Montage in its entirety looks like this:

Once in a while, I alter a paint-stained stencil with scissors, then use it as an element in a mixed-media collage --

The collage above began with diluted paints on Yupo.  After those paints dried, I added the stained stencil, 6" x 6" Sassy Spray.  (Heavy matte medium gel was the adhesive I chose.)  The last step was to add a couple of small bits of paper in the upper left.

Sassy Spray, before it meets paint stain and scissors, looks like this--

To round out today's post, I'm circling back to an artwork like the one at the top of this post.  This is another collage that started with prepared background paper -- in this case, prepared with acrylic paints, texture-making tools and a squeeze bottle of fabric paint.  Over that, I added an old print of mine, created back when I was carving my own rubber stamps.  (Seeing this collage makes me want to dig out that eye rubber stamp to use it again!)  Over that, I added four pieces of paper.  The fourth piece, printed in bright red-orange-purple on blue, is actually a silhouette of a human figure.  This figure is more easily recognized when you click on the image below to enlarge it.  

The human figure above was cut from a print made with Small Tangled Pods, a 6" x 6" mask.

Small Tangled Pods looks like this --

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