Frieda Oxenham: Art Journaling with StencilGirl® Stencils

The second month of 2021 already! I’m writing this a lot earlier so have no idea what this year has brought us thus far but I’m hoping life will be looking a bit more normal than it did in 2020. In the meantime I’m continuing to illustrate the words of a poem by Ben Okri and for this month I’m only using one page. The accompanying spread on the right hand side will follow in the future.

Here are the steps I took:

1.      Tear out the definitions of Fear, Dream and Secret from a vintage dictionary and glue onto the page (sized 8 x 11.5”) using a glue stick.

2.      Add some pieces of tissue wrap (I used Tim Holtz’s Melange)

3.      Cover the page with watered down white gesso using a baby wipe.

4.      Drip on some pink neon acrylic paint (I used Golden). 

5.      Brush on different colors of paint and remove again with a baby wipe through the large stencil of the StencilGirl® November 2020 Club set.

6.      Cut a figure from a magazine to use as a silhouette. Set aside.

7.      Take a sturdy page from a vintage book and spray with a variety of sparkly spray paints.

8.      Stencil on the page using the large stencil from the July 2019 StencilGirl® Club with white and colored paints.

9.      Add more stenciling using dark blue paint and stencil Kyoto.

10.  Take the figure from step 6 and trace the outline on your vintage page. Cut out and glue onto the page as shown

11.  Outline the figure using a black Stabilo All pencil. Also outline the words Fear, Secret and Dream from step 1, using the same pencil and any of the many circle stencils available from StencilGirl®. I used the large stencil from the March 2015 StencilGirl® club.

12.  Add the text of the Ben Okri quotation using a Dymo Writer onto self-adhesive tape. Glue on. And cut out the words Secret, Dream and Fear from magazines and glue onto the figure as shown. Outline all the text using the Stabilo All Pencil.

13.  Outline some of the background pattern with a white permanent marker.

14.  Glue on postage stamps as shown.

15.  Spray the figure with gold mica spray paint and glue on the original head as cut out in step 10. I found it just needed that rather than the painted head.

Outline the edges of the page with a blue inkpad. 

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