Friday, July 10, 2015

Seeing the World in My Eyes with July StencilClub

Hi Everyone, it's Gwen here today to share an art journal page made with this month's exclusive StencilClub stencils designed by Mary C. Nasser.

As a fellow lover of maps, I was pretty excited when I saw this month's designs! So many possibilities! In fact, I had so many ideas running through my mind that I got blocked and couldn't think of a single thing to do. Sound familiar? Fortunately, I knew I needed to come up with something I could share, so that gave me a push to at least get started. So I just began by stenciling random paper. 

When I'm working on a project and I have leftover paint or ink, sometimes I put it on other pages in my art journal to become part of a future background, but lately, most of the time I take a piece of deli paper, copy paper, or whatever underpaper I've got out at the time and clean off my paint there. This has given me a lot of great loose background pieces that I can use for all kinds or projects!

After getting together a good stack together, I decided to do some collage in my journal. I've been dabbling in collage a lot lately, inspired by many different artists, but for this project I thought I'd try something along the lines of the amazing work by Peter Clark with a little bonus inspiration from my favorite Depeche Mode song, "World in My Eyes" (I think I'm showing my age with that one!)

I basically just started with the concept of an eye, broke it into layers, and then looked through my papers to find colors and patterns that I liked for each section.

A little bizarre? Yes! But it works for me. I started by taking the black deli paper that I had stenciled on with gold ink and collaging it to a patterned paper background in my junque journal (note to self... pigment ink needs to be heat set if you're going to go over it with matte medium!) Some of the gold smudged as I was collaging, but it still worked and I covered up most of it anyway.

I started with the deli paper stenciled with the 9x12 stencil and cut it into an eye shape and built out from there. Then I took two different colors stenciled with the 4x4 stencil layered on top of each other so the design matched - it worked great for the iris and pupil. 

You can see where the eyelid comes up a bit - I actually mounted it on foam tape so that there would be just a little bit of dimension (not too much since it's in my journal!) For the letters in the title, I took a piece of paper that had been painted and then stenciled and wrote out the word backwards in block letters on the back of the paper. I just cut them out, adhered, and outlined. For that I used a gold Sakura Pen Touch (my favorite metallic pens!) 

The eyelashes were from where I'd stenciled the 6x6 onto a sheet of deli paper with black Archival Ink. I cut it to fit the shape of the eye and then went through with my scissors to add a fringe. I finished everything off with my signature dots!

So there you go! A slightly out of the ordinary page, but a fun way for you to think about using this month's stencils (or any stencils!) in your work. 

If you're not a member of StencilClub yet but you want to get your hands on this month's stencils, it's not too late! Make sure you sign up by the 15th and you'll start your membership with this set.

Hope you enjoyed today's post... until next time, happy stenciling!

5 comments:

  1. I am a big fan of Peter Clark's work, too!
    And I love what you created inspired by him! Your painted papers are gorgeous, and I love the complexity and dimension of your art journal page! This is fantastic, Gwen!! :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. This is really wonderful Gwen.

    ReplyDelete

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