Guest Designer Frieda Oxenham

A big clear up is happening in my studio at the moment,  and I’m discovering lots of things I had long forgotten. One of these were 5 left over 5 x 7” watercolor cards, cold pressed, by Strathmore and they seemed very suited to my June Project.

Here is the tutorial:

1.     Using a 5 x 7” gelli plate, brayer on 3 colours of acrylic paint in horizontal layers and take a print. Do this for every card. Clean your gelli plate and brayer on a sheet of copy paper after every colour change.

2.     Using the 5 x 7” gelli plate, brayer on transparent gold acrylic paint and take prints of the entire plate on all the cards.

3.     Again using the 5 x 7 gelli plate, brayer on a small horizontal layer of paint in different colours for each card and including black and white. Put a stencil on top and take a print on selected areas of your cards. Then remove the stencil and take another print on the left over paint on another card. I used stencils S898 Abstract Water Surface, S423 Grindstones C small and the medium stencil of the December 2017 StencilClub. Again use the copy paper sheet from step 1 to clean plate and brayer.

4.     Stencil partial text to the cards using blue acrylic paint, a cosmetic wedge and stencils L827 Emotions and Feelings 1 and L318 Wall of Words.

5.     Using the sheet used for cleanup in step 1 and 3 together with stencil L583 Figments of Imagination, outline some of the figures onto the sheet with pencil and cut out.

6.     Mark out outlines from stencil L888 Mid Century Modern Circle Patterns using a pencil and paint them using permanent paint markers.

7.     Glue on the figures cut out in step 5 onto the cards.

8.     Outline the figures with a white permanent marker and the circle patterns with gelli pens. 

9.     Glue on transparent tissue paper fragments (mine are by Tim Holtz). 

10.  Using the same stencil as in step 5 to mask the area around the figures, put stencil S423 on top of the figures and spray through the stencil with a blue sparkling spray paint (I used Perfect Pearl Mist). 

11.  Drip down silver pearlescent acrylic ink onto the cards. 

12.  Glue on text (from magazine) and outline it with a black Stabilo All pencil

13.  Edge the cards with a permanent black inkpad.

Frieda Oxenham © 2024