Cecilia Swatton

 Looking for a "new" substrate for stencil-printing?  Try mica, a translucent mineral that comes in thin layers (and can be split into even thinner layers to create additional pieces and get more bang for your buck!) Several types of mica are available; some has a reflective quality much like a mirror.  Others are tinted brown; still others are nearly as clear as glass.

Several online sources exist for ordering sheets of mica.  One of the packages I've ordered looks like this: 

Mica lends itself to many delightful artsy uses.  It can easily be cut with scissors to form any shape you want.  It has a slick surface that accepts acrylic paint as well as some markers; the marker I've used here is the IDenti Pen permanent marker by Sakura.  

These tiles can be layered over paper or any other surface, using a clear-drying adhesive such as gloss gel -- it takes only a small dot or two of the gel, and in fact it's better to use a couple of dots rather than to spread the gel across the entire piece of mica.

Because it's flat, mica can be used for layered art that will fit smoothly onto the pages of an art journal.  But, because it's also rigid, it can also work beautifully on a journal cover as 3D art, supported underneath by 3D pop-up glue dots. 

My only caution is that, despite it being a mineral, its splitting quality sometimes makes it a little fragile around the edges of each piece.  The more the sheets are split apart, the more fragile these edges become.  When they first arrive, they are thickly layered, with barely any fragility.  But I end up splitting my tiles, to make them more translucent and to increase the number of tiles in each package.

Stencil-printed mica really makes a statement when used as "dangle-art."  You can punch a hole in the top of stencil-printed mica to make dangle earrings, Christmas tree ornaments and wire-linked charms for hanging in windows.    

Today I'm posting artwork made on mica with some of my stencils....



Above: To embellish this greeting card cover, I painted a layer of silver metallic acrylic paint over a tile of mica and used the 9"x 12" mask Clustered Leaves with heavy-body black acrylic paint to imprint the shapes of leaves.  Then I came back in with a red permanent marker to brighten the diagonal lines in the leaves.

Above: In developing this greeting card cover, I started by making 2 prints on the greeting card blank -- one with heavy body silver metallic paint and 9"x 12" Clustered Leaves, and one with heavy body metallic copper acrylic paint and 9"x 12" Loopy Ladders.  After those two prints had dried, I used extra heavy gloss acrylic gel to add a barrel-shaped mica tile printed using 9"x 12" Loopy Ladders with the same copper paint.  Atop that, I added a photo of an artwork I'd painted years ago.

Above: I used heavy body silver metallic paint and 9" x 12" Clustered Leaves in decorating this rectangular mica tile.  After that paint dried, I used extra heavy gloss acrylic gel to adhere the tile to a sheet of corrugated cardboard previously painted with red and purple acrylic paints.

Above center:  Loopy Ladders was used on a piece of reflective mica; again the paint was heavy body metallic copper acrylic paint and again the background is previously painted corrugated cardboard.

Above:  an isolated leaf printed with 9" x 12" Clustered Leaves (notice the translucency of the mica which lets you see part of the foil background)

Above:  one leaf from Clustered Leaves (again, notice the translucency of the mica which lets you see part of the background, which was created with a combination of Clustered Leaves and Loopy Ladders, the same as it had been in an earlier example in today's post.

I'm not a scrapbooker -- so, instead of showing images in a scrapbook below, I've substituted three digital art prints that I made several years ago.  On each of these three images I've used the same sheet of transparent mica, trimmed around the edges with metallic acrylic paint thru parts of my Loopy Ladders stencil.  This is to show how a piece of mica -- with its edges stencil-printed -- can be used as a frame-accent for any area of your art that you want to highlight:

Above:  This frame highlights a digital art print that I created in Photoshop.  I used the same silhouette in designing my 6" x 6" stencil Heron.

Today's featured masks look like this:

Loopy Ladders (9"x 12")

Clustered Leaves (9"x 12")

Thanks for taking time to stop by my blog today!  To scroll thru the pages of my StencilGirl stencils and masks, please start here.

Note:  The Feedburner team has discontinued its option for receiving my blog posts via their email subscription.   

To subscribe to this blog by email, please leave a Comment giving your email address.  Comment options are provided at the end of each blog post.  Since I have Comment Moderation, I can read comments but keep them from being published on the blog.  So your email addresses will not appear here on my blog.  Rather, I will be collecting them and adding them to my private emailing list thru Yahoo Email. I do not sell anyone's email address, period.  I don't like it when mine gets sold and I live by the Golden Rule!