Cecilia Swatton

Today brings a new stencil release!  Can you pick out the newest one in the image below?

BIG HINT HERE!  In creating my brand-new 6" x 6" Garden at Nemours Stencil S844 --

-- I designed an image the exact reverse of my 6" x 6" Garden at Nemours Mask S658, below:

A while ago, it had occurred to me that I'd have fun playing with opposites, but I really didn't foresee that having both stencil and mask would blow open the door to new possibilities that don't exist when either is used alone.  

Pairing these two art-making tools creates new variety as well as unity in my artwork.  

Unity comes from repetition of an image or design or pattern.

Variety is built by the fact that one's a stencil and the other's a mask -- so the repetition isn't predictable or monotonous. 

Unity and variety make for more interesting, complex art on the page of a journal or a painting to hang on the wall.

Kicking off today's series of art samples is a page from an old encyclopedia, chosen because (in the upper left) it has an illustration of a leafy plant.

Below that illustration I first used Garden at Nemours Stencil S844 with a rich golden hue of Pan Pastel. 

Next, with a reddish Pan Pastel, I again grabbed the stencil, but this time, flipped it horizontally.  

My third step was to reach for Garden at Nemours Mask S658 and make an imprint with a Pan Pastel of blue color.  Unfortunately, I made the hasty person's mistake of failing to clean my applicator before dipping it into the pastel.  So my "blue" print actually looks gray -- 

Since the golden color and the blue are near-opposites on the color wheel, they automatically tone each other down, merging into a neutral color.  Yes, I knew this in advance, but I'd made the mistake of rushing.  (Story of my life!)

So as you look at the image below, please picture the central print as blue!

For my next adventure, I switched from Pan Pastels to heavy-body acrylic paint, which I loaded onto a sponge brayer for application thru the stencil and the mask.

I made the first print using Garden at Nemours Stencil S844 with a rich golden-yellow.  My substrate was a sheet of watercolor paper that had been previously prepared to be a background.

After that paint layer had dried, I used Garden at Nemours Mask S658 with pink brayer-applied paint --

-- and layered that over the original golden-yellow print.

Going back to Garden at Nemours Stencil, I made the final print using blue translucent paint.  Translucency was the quality I wanted for all three of the paints because I wanted each layer to be visible in the final print.  In close-up detail, it's shown below.

 

Today's last art sample started with a stenciled layer of yellow acrylic used with Garden at Nemours Stencil S844--

Then I printed its pale aqua middle layer using the Garden at Nemours Mask S658, flipped horizontally.  For the third, top layer, I went back to the brand-new stencil, using dark green paint:

I hope today's pieces demonstrate ....

(1) unity -- similar elements that hold a piece together under one umbrella theme; 

(2) as well as variety -- differing the way a near-identical design is presented, so as to increase visual interest and move viewers' eyes around the entire artwork.

More posts featuring stencil-and-mask combinations are coming very soon!  One of them digs deeper into my compositional thoughts for the final art sample in today's post. 

Thanks for coming to my blog today.  If you would like to scroll thru the pages of my StencilGirl stencils and masks, please start here.