Guest Designer Frieda Oxenham

1.     Collage was calling me, so I started by making a collection of papers to collage with. Most of them already had some colour as they were produced for previous projects or used to clean up brayers and brushes. There were copy papers as well as deli papers.

2.     Using a 9 x 12” gelli plate and stencil L117 X-12 I added acrylic paints to the gelli plate with a brayer, put the stencil on top and took partial prints on the papers selected in step 1, then removed the stencil and took more prints. I used a variety of acrylic paints, including some metallic ones. Pic2A, 2B and 2C

3.     I’m working on a black Arteza DIY frame sketch pad, where a pre-scored sheet of black paper can be folded into a 7 x 8.6” frame.

4.     Collage pieces of the papers from step 2 onto the frame. Start with a potential background lay-out and take a photograph as a reminder before gluing them down. 

Once glued down add more pieces until you are happy with the finished piece. 

5.     Using gold acrylic paint and a cosmetic wedge, stencil on the frames (I worked on two frames simultaneously) through stencil S200 Illegible. 

6.     Using stencil S104 Flowerhead, a cosmetic wedge and titanium white acrylic paint, add flowers to the backgrounds on both pieces.

7.     Outline the flowers with a permanent red pigment marker.

8.     Glue on the vintage text and outline with a black Stabilo All pencil

9.     Outline the edges of the frames with a gold permanent marker.

© Frieda Oxenham 2024

Stencils, Easter Eggs and Rolling Out a Whole Lot of Fun

Hi friends!  Hard to believe springtime is just around the corner. In Southern California, it already feels that way because today was actually 87 degrees!  Nearly summer, but not, lol.  Anyway, with Easter approaching I thought it might be fun to turn Easter eggs into artwork. Not hard to decorate by any means, you can still do the traditional egg dyeing but then consider adding some stenciled embellishments or stencil decor directly onto the eggs or you can try a few creative things with the gelli plate, deli paper, or simply do some watercoloring.

For all my eggs, I created the background first.  I enjoyed using the gelli plate with stencils because I could continue to roll the egg until it was entirely covered in paint. (I also managed to clean my plate. :).)   Sometimes the stencil images remained clear and sometimes they got a bit layered but isn't that what mixed media is about?  Lots of textures come from layering.( I loved using the smaller gelli plate for my egg "dyeing", as shown below.)

Applying Seth Apter's stamps (Planner Basics) and watercolors for the egg's background on the banded egg shown below,  I embellished a strip of watercolor paper with Ann Butler's 1 x 4 Rails stencil set using both paint and watercolors and wrapped it around the egg, adhering it in place. This is a great set with petite images.  The tulip from the Scattered Bunnies, Blooms & Birds Background Stencil by Margaret Peot was watercolored too. This is a wonderful stencil for springtime and works well for the eggs again, because of its small designs.  

Deli paper is an ideal surface and substrate to make prints for eggs.  The paper allows for a perfect design and it's thin enough that the underlying color or design, as in the egg, can be seen. (See egg below.) I actually used ink to create my images onto the paper shown here then tore them down to manageable sizes and adhered them to my eggs with a glue stick.  Basic collage-making.  If your image is too large, you might get wrinkles in your paper so smaller images are ideal. However, you can make small snips into some images, which can help them lie flat.  Sometimes there is a little overlap but it still looks nice.  (Notice the large daisy flower at the top of the egg.) 

Some stencils are perfect for working directly onto the egg like this Hexagon Set by Ann Butler.

And of course, making fussy-cut images always adds dimension to any project.  Here I attached a black string to my gelli-rolled egg, watercolored a few flowers from watercolor paper, cut them out, and adhered them to the egg.  I love using these for table decor for Easter. 

And for those of you who don't celebrate Easter, consider all the ways you can embellish and decorate painted paper mache shapes. They would look beautiful on top of a gift!  

Well, that's it from me today! Time to do some major clean up, but I say, if you can't get a little messy when creating, you might be missing all the fun.  Leave the overthinking behind, get your hands a bit painty and start playing. What's on your art agenda?   

Thanks for reading my friends, 

Debi 

https://debi-adams.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/debi_adams/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/debi.adams.779

 

Frieda Oxenham: Artwork with StencilGirl® Stencils

February is a month with very low light levels and after getting through January I always dread going through another winter month. At least it’s shorter by some days! One way I use to cheer myself up is to use as much colour as possible whenever I can, and this project (or rather projects) grew out of that desire.

Here is the tutorial:

1.      Using copy paper and an 8 x 10” (or larger) gelli plate, brayer on a variety of acrylic paint colours and take prints. Keep in mind that these pages will become elements of a collage so will be torn up. Just go made with your favourite colours and enjoy yourself. Make a good selection. I ended up with about 20 pages in total.

2.      Again using the gelli plate, add one or two colours of acrylic paint to the plate, put a stencil on top and take a print on the pages produced in step 1. Also remove the stencil and take prints from the negative image left behind on the plate. I used the following stencils:  the large stencil from the August 2020 StencilClub, Batik stencil, Circles Circles, the large stencil from the March 2014 StencilClub.

3.      Using the same stencils as in step 2 but using some additional colours take more prints on your pages to add another layer.

4.      Using different colours (including white) and 2 different stencils add yet another layer to some of your pages. You might like some of your pages as they are already, so leave them be, but remember we are going to collage with all the pages so don’t get too attached to them. I used 2 different stencils for this step: the large stencil from the February 2012 StencilClub and Spirit Wind Mask.

5.      Using an 8.5 square art journal with black pages or any journal of your choice, start tearing the papers using a ruler (I used the Tim Holtz one) and start laying the pieces out on the pages. Also add vintage images, text and music to the mix. Glue it all on with a glue stick.

6.      Once you’re happy with the arrangement, cover the pages with matte medium and let dry.

7.      Add dark blue circular images to the pages using stencil Ripples Small and Inky Circles

8.      Rub some colour over the vintage papers with acrylic paint.

9.      Glue some more text or music over the top of the pages.

10.  Outline the circles added in step 7 with a permanent black inkpad.

11.  Edge the pages with a black permanent inkpad

12.  After I had finished the pages in my black art journal, I thought it would be interesting to scale it up on a larger sheet of black paper so I ordered some from Arteza. However I did not read the description properly and ending up with sheets that were pre-scored to be folded into a frame sized 7 x 8.6”

13.  As I had so much collage material left, I used 3 of these sheets to make 3 frames following the steps mentioned above. To finish them I added a flower postage stamp to each and edged the frames with a permanent black inkpad.

I really enjoyed working on the black frames so in the end I received what I didn’t know I wanted!

© Frieda Oxenham 2022. To see more of Frieda's work, please visit her BLOG.

Frieda Oxenham: Art Journaling with StencilGirl® Stencils

We are slowly nearing the end of Ben Okri’s poem that I have been illustrating here, and have reached the words: “The dream is real, and the real is a dream”. Too true! This entire period of our lives has seemed extremely surreal and it is hard to imagine what our “normal” lives before the end of 2019 looked liked. I somehow think that that sort of normality will probably never fully return but hopefully our real world will slowly become a nicer dream. I also liked the words as they gave me the opportunity to use one of my most favourite stencils, one of those I keep aside on a separate pile, for special occasions. It is stencil Lyrical Leaves. It’s based on the principle of Nōtan: Nōtan is a Japanese design concept involving the play and placement of light and dark elements as they are placed next to the other in the composition of art and imagery. This stencil does this beautifully and also seemed to resonate with the difference between dreams and reality, so the scene was set to make this spread. Here is the tutorial:

1.       Use a large gelli plate, a brayer and 5 or 6 different colours of acrylic paint and take a print. Do this for two facing 8 x 11.5” pages.

2.       Using some of the same paint colours on your gelli plate, add Mark Making on top of the plate and take random partial prints on both pages.

3.       Add white paint to the gelli plate and put the large stencil from the April 2020 StencilClub on top, and take more random partial prints on the pages.

4.       Using stencil Lyrical Leaves, put it on the pages and lightly mark the corners of the centre square on the pages with a pencil

5.       Add vintage collage pieces within these marks using a glue stick.

6.       Spray both pages randomly with bronze spray paint (I used Brusho Shimmer spray colour Bronze)

7.       For the next step I was going to make a separate page but as sometimes serendipitously happens I found that I already had the perfect gelli plate print to use. It was a misprint as I wanted to add text and forgot to reverse the stencil (as you do, very frequently in my case!). The colours were like the ones I had used on my pages but with enough of a contrast to still stand out. The stencil I used to make this misprint was Now is the Time.

8.       Take Lyrical Leaves again and put it on the misprint from step 7, and mark out the pattern with a permanent black marker, and then cut it out with either scissors, a craft knife or a cutting machine if you have one. I won’t deny this is pretty fiddly (unless you have a machine) but it will be worth it!

9.       Put the result of one sheet of pieces cut out on one of your pages and the remainder of the sheet with the pieces cut out from it on the other. Use the stencil as a guide line for this last step. Glue down with Soft Matte Gel.

10.   Outline the shapes on both pages with a permanent black marker.

11.   Provide further contrast by stenciling on shapes, with blue paint, through the large stencil from the March 2021 StencilClub.

12.   Add little and large golden circles randomly to the pages using the large stencil from the August 2013 Club for the large circles and the large stencil from the December 2017 Club for the small ones. I used a palette knife and gold embossing paste for this.

13.   Add the text as shown, printed out from your computer and edged with a Distress Ink pad colour Walnut Stain.

14.   Edge the pages with the same ink pad.

© Frieda Oxenham 2021. To see more of Frieda's work, please visit her BLOG.

Frieda Oxenham: Art Journaling with StencilGirl® Stencils

There is more of Ben Okri’s poem left to illustrate and this month’s pages are a continuation of last month when I made a spread featuring the text: “The wise say life is a dream, and soon the dream is done”. The poem continues: “But what you did in the dream, is all that counts beneath the sun. In other words make your life worth living. This resonates specially during these still very difficult days in a world pandemic.  I aimed to make these dreamlike pages.

Here is the tutorial:

1.      Add gold gesso to two facing pages of 8 x 11.5”. I used my gelli plate to do this but you can also brayer or brush it on.

2.      Using a gelli plate large enough to cover your pages, put stencil Mountain Landscape underneath the plate, and on the top of the plate paint acrylic paint in suitable colours for the landscape. Then put the stencil on top of the painted gelli plate and take the print. Do this for both pages and for the second page use the other side of the stencil to get a mirror image.

3.      Stencil again, this time in the conventional way, with the stencil used in step 2, this time using a cosmetic wedge and the same colours but off setting it slightly. This gives an impressionistic image.

4.       Apply Glass Bead Gel (from Golden) to the right hand page through stencil Aztec Sun Large.

5.      Spray and paint the sun with yellow, orange and gold paint.

6.      Glue on the figure to the left hand page. My images are from a Stamperia rice paper collage sheet. Use gel medium to attach and also add the ship image to the facing page.

7.      Also glue on some flowers from the collage sheet.

8.      Stencil on leaves from the large stencil from April 2021 StencilClub using green paint and a cosmetic wedge.

9.      Add coloured circles (to represent flowers) by stencilling through stencil Starlight 6 x 6 using red, orange and yellow paint and a cosmetic wedge.

10.  Outline the leaves with a green colouring pencil and outline the rice paper images with a Stabilo All black pencil. Outline the mountain shapes with a brown colouring pencil.

11.  Add the text with a Dymo writer on transparent, self adhesive tape and outline with a permanent black marker.

12.  Glue on postage stamps as shown.

13.  Edge the pages with a permanent blue inkpad.

© Frieda Oxenham 2021. To see more of Frieda's work, please visit her BLOG.