Rock your favorite stencil!

Hi everyone, hope you are all doing well and having a great summer.

Have you ever heard of pareidolia? 

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon that causes people to see patterns in a random stimulus. 

This often leads to people assigning human characteristics to objects. 

Usually this is simplified to people seeing faces in objects where there isn’t one ( like cloud watching)...
or like seeing a mushroom in a rock.

Whatever you want to call it, I call it inspiration.

 So, an idea starts to evolve, and I beging thinking, now which one of my stencils to use? One of my options was to use my Tea Cup stencil and then follow it up with an Alice in Wonderland quote, like:
“Would you like an adventure now or shall we have tea first?”
...but in the end I decided to go with something more in the meditation theme because it's in those quiet moments of gardening that inspiration comes to me, like seeing an odd shaped rock... so I chose my Artistic Muse Card #1 with the meditating fairy artist.
Now that I had chosen which stencil to use I went to town painting in the mushroom and the background to set the "stage". I really love the odd shape of this rock and how the shape of the rock controls the flow of design here. The mushroom fits in pretty well, eh?

The next step was placing the meditating fairy artist underneath the mushroom and I sponged on some white acrylic paint in case I smudged any during the process because I make mistakes, lol It also makes it easier to change parts of the stenciling if I paint her in with some color if I choose to alter a part of the design.

So now you can tell that there is actually a part of my stencil design that I left off, her crown and ponytail. I also filled in the wings and made them a little bit fuller. I like to change things up a bit and get as many different versions as I can using the same stencil. 

I wish I could tell you that I'm a great planner and always know the course my art is taking but truthfully, I am a fly by the seat of your pants kinda gal, so I sit back and look and do a lot of thinking before the next step. I changed my mind about the wings and decided to paint them out.

After painting over the base coat, I laid the stencil back over her (after she was dry) so that I could add in any details that I needed that might have gotten lost with the first layer of paint.

 

I didn't take photos of my actually "painting" or the creative lettering since the importance here is on how I used my one stencil, 4 different ways. I wanted to try something different by using parts from the other designs to see if I could paint a complete scene. I haven't used this stencil together like this before and it was a lot of fun to do.

Stretching my stencil

1. The first and most obvious is the meditating art fairy whose wings and crown were removed and a tiny bit of personalization to make it look like someone I know...wink, wink.

2. The flowers were created from the sun of the Happy as a Child Artist, layered with many colors.

3. The yellow lines in the mushroom's stalk are harder to see, but the pattern from the horses' mane really was just perfect to provide a little texture. It's hard to see because I washed over it with some dark watered down paint to make the yellow color blend in better. 

4. The flowers are from the bouquet of art splatters that the Happy Artist is tossing around and they work great as a field of flowers too...OK, that wasn't so much of a stretch, lol 

Thank you for taking the time to read my post and here's hoping you find some inspiration in your garden too. 

Happy summer stenciling with StencilGirl!

Sandee