Carol Ponsford - Fun shrink art clips for art journaling!

Hi bloggers, Carol Ponsford here today with a project to add some fun to 

your art journaling, I will be showing you how I created these clips to hold your pages

open while you create in your art journals that will add a smile to your face.

I started with Shrink plastic, the stencil of choice (this one is L767 - Three Swamp Monsters 

stencil designed by Angela Treat Lyon), and a fine line Sharpie. I love these little whimsical characters!

(I also created one using L502 designed by Gwen Lafleur that you will see further down the page.)

I placed the stencil down on some card stock paper and traced around all of the sections

of the stencil and added some extra embellishments where I wanted.

With the stencil still in place, I took colored pencils and colored in all of the areas.

When using Shrink plastic, you need to remember that when you shrink the image,

the colors will become darker than first applied during the shrinking process.

Next, I carefully cut the image out. Since this image had many thin areas, I left 

some of the uncolored areas to add support for the thin sections.

The next step was to shrink the image. I used an old splatter screen to help 

keep the plastic from curling up too much and getting stuck to itself.

I had some areas stick but I was able to use a needle tool to pull the 

stuck areas apart carefully so I would not tear pieces off of the image.

I stopped part of the way through to show how much the piece will twist and curl

during the heating/Shrinking process. As you can see it gets quite curly.

The image will shrink approximately to half of it's original size as shown above.

I also did 3 other images using other types of pens to color the image. The top image 

was done with Posca markers, the second image was done with Copic markers, 

and the 3rd was the one with colored pencils. On this 4th image I 

did not trace the image on first, I started with placing the stencil under the 

shrink plastic, colored in areas with Copic markers and then laid the stencil 

on top and traced with the Sharpie pen. I wanted to show that there

are several ways to use shrink plastic and different pens that will work.

The colored pencils will give a much softer look than the Posca or Copic markers.

The next step was to trace each piece onto a piece of card stock and 

cut it out. Because I wanted to make sure the colors showed as much as possible

I felt putting white behind them would add to their brightness as well

as add a more absorbent base to help them adhere to the metal clips.

I used Gel Matte Medium to glue them on to the card stock.

This step might not be necessary but I did sand the card stock on the back

of the pieces a little as well as the metal hair clips I used to help them adhere better.

 

I used 2 thin popsicle sticks to hold the hair clips in place during the gluing stage

to help insure that the glue would not drip on the clip and seal it closed. This 

also helped to level the clips and stabilize them while they were drying.

I used 527 glue but I am sure there are many other glues that would work.

Once they are dry, I hope you will enjoy using them in your art journaling to hold the 

pages open as you create in your journal. And just maybe, when you catch 

one out of the corner of your eye, they will bring a smile!

Thank you so much for joining me today on the blog and I hope you will

create some of these journal clips for yourself. I want to thank 

StencilGirl® Products for providing me with these stencils so 

that I can share what I created with you.

Happy Creating!

To see more of my work please visit my Instagram page.

Creative Play & Collage with Stencils

Hi StencilGirl® friends! Nicole here, and today I’m playing with stencils and collaging in my art journal.

 

In January I began a very unplanned cleaning and purging of my art studio. Phew! I still have some drawers and shelves that I need to tackle, but the re-set and clean feel so good.  

 

Due to just one of those years, I had a couple piles of supplies and things I purchased that I hadn’t sat down to play with. So, I grabbed the paint and a few stencils to explore to have a creative play session. It was so good. Even though I didn’t love everything I created, I learned, discovered, explored and best of all let loose! Splashing paint around and not caring is the best. We all need to schedule these play times into our art practice!

 

In that play session, I created a couple of small stenciled papers that I feel in love with and just knew I needed to add them to my art journal.

To make the papers, first I added a layer of watered-down gesso. 

Then, I splashed around some walnut ink on one and watered-down Payne’s gray on the other. 

When those were dry, I grabbed a new to me paint color, purple madder (matte acrylic paint by Blick), and used it through the longwood florals stencil. Before the paint could completely dry, I also scuffed up the stenciled imaged a bit and added some watered-down purple madder too.

Next, I had to figure out what to do with them! I grabbed my art journal and stuck down some blank ledger paper. Then, I broke those ledger sheets by first spreading around some paint and gesso and then loosely tracing inside the bittersweet mini stencil with my stabilo all in graphite. 

I then activated it with my dirty paint water. It had the most beautiful lavender hue from the purple madder paint. After that, I splashed around some walnut ink.

After breaking those pages, I thought a simple collage on each would be perfect. It took me a while and lots of moving around of papers and images to achieve what I wanted. I’m not a seasoned collage artist, and it’s one of my goals this year to play more with collage.

For the papers, I used my stenciled cyanotypes and stenciled pages. You can read how I created them and see tutorials here on the StencilGirl® blog. (The stenciled page sheet was from another play session similar to the one linked to the blog post but doesn’t appear in the blog.)

I topped off the collages with a vintage photograph, some really old stamps, and the string the stamps were tied up with.

My last step was to just add a touch of watered-down Payne's gray around the bits of Boro collage papers.

Watch how it all came together, and count how many times I moved the paper bits around in the video tutorial below.

 

 

 

-Nicole

Connect with me on

• Instagram
• YouTube
• My website

 

Stencils

   Longwood Florals

   Bittersweet Mini

Cyanotype Stencils

   Vintage Typewriter Numbers

   Journal Texture 12

   Symbol Grid

 

Stenciled Paper
   Boro (cyanotype version pictured above)

 

Supplies

• Ledger or book papers
• Acrylic paint
• Gesso
• Matte Medium
• Old photograph, stamps, ephemera
• Collage Papers
• Walnut ink
• Stabilo all (graphite)
• Dirty paint water

Guest Designer Frieda Oxenham

Sometimes all it takes to start a page in an art journal is a line read in a magazine. In this case the line “ahead of the curve” coincided with the arrival of the recent  StencilClub stencils for November.

Here is the tutorial:

1.     Using an 8 x 10” gelli plate add one or more colours of acrylic paint to it and take prints on copy and deli paper. 

2.      Add more acrylic paints to your plate, then add one or more of the stencils named below to the plate, take prints onto the papers made in step 1, and then remove the stencils, take more prints onto other papers from step 1. Here are some examples. L901 Map Pattern,  L885 Connection, S899 Rippled Water, L969 Squiggle Doodle.

3.   Keep overprinting like this using all the above stencils (and more) on your already printed papers. 

4.     You will end up with far more papers than you’ll need but it is good to have lots of choices and anyway, we all love a good painted paper stash, right!

5.     Working in your choice of art journal (I’m using a huge A3 (11.7 x 16.5”) one) start collaging on the page without gluing anything down yet. Simple select a rectangle from one of your favourite printed pages, put it in any of the corners (I started top right) and take it from there, based on what looks good together, varying large and small pieces and balancing the colours. You have plenty of papers so cut or tear them to your heart’s content. I used a metal ruler to tear my papers. Keep playing around till you have an arrangement that you like.

6.     Now glue down the pieces but first take a quick picture on your phone to remind yourself of your arrangement.

7.     Once you have this background glued down start adding smaller pieces as the next layer.

8.     Using one of the stencils form the November 2023 StencilClub and white acrylic paint add circles to the page as shown.

9.     Using the other stencil from the November 2023 StencilClub, stencil the bicycle with red acrylic paint onto deli paper, cut it out and glue it to the page at bottom right.

10.  Using the same stencil as in step 9 add small circles to the page with red and metallic bronze paint.

11.  Glue on your chosen text, cut from magazines. Mine reads: “Find your imagination, ahead of the curve”.

12.  With light blue paint and the same stencil as in step 8 add more of the large circles on the page.

13.  Using a mix of Stabilo All black pencil and water soluble oil pastels, outline the large circles, bike and text and scribble randomly with the pencil. 

©Frieda Oxenham 2024