Frieda Oxenham: Making Backgrounds and Collage Materials with StencilGirl Stencils & Gelli Plates!

A Dangerous Young Lady

It’s great to back in 2016 as Guest Designer for StencilGirl and I want to thank them so much for inviting me! This project is a challenge to make as many pages you can think off, with just one stencil, to make backgrounds and collage material to use in this and future projects.

1. Using an 8 x 10” Gelli plate and Letter Mania, cover sheets of copy paper using both sides of the stencil and using it as both a mask and a stencil. Don’t worry too much about the composition as all these pages will be torn up and used as collage. This is a good exercise for getting acquainted with your Gelli plate

   and investigating the possibilities of just one stencil.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
2. On a background of 9 x 12” 140lb hot pressed watercolor paper, collage pieces of the Gelli plate printed paper.

   I did one background of rectangular cut pieces and one of torn pieces.
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Using both ordinary acrylic paint as well as spray paint stencil flowers on the remaining Gelli print papers using Doodle It Daisy and Nonsensical Bloom.
   
   
   
4. Cut out the flowers.
   
   
   
5. Cut out a figure from a fashion magazine, mark around it on the back of one of your Gelli plate printed pages and cut that out.
   
   
   
6. Glue on figure and flowers onto backgrounds. I don’t like figures without faces so I have her one originating from Lucas Cranach the Elder’s painting The Nymphs of Spring.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
7. Outline with black and white markers and edge the side of the pages with a black permanent ink-pad. Stick on sparkling centers to the flowers. 
   
   
   
8. Glue on text onto the figure. Mine reads: a dangerous young lady.
9. Gesso 2 pages of a vintage ledger with black gesso.
10. Glue on the two pages. I used double sided tape for this purpose.
11. Using a gold pen, outline around each page, about ¼” away from all sides of the pages.
    
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(C) Frieda Oxenham 2016. To see more of Frieda's work, please visit her BLOG.