Hello Creatives!

Design Team Member,  Keri Sallee , here and today i wanted to share with you a recent art journal page I did while I was traveling.

I was running a little late while packing for this trip, so I just grabbed a few supplies (because you can’t go without them, right!?) I brought a few sketching pencils, my NeoColors, watercolor paper and of course a handful of TCW Stencils. I didn’t look through them…I simply grabbed a big stack of 6×6 stencils and shoved them in a backpack with my other supplies.

When it came time to create, it was kind of fun challenging myself by saying “OK…here’s all you have…what can you make?” I will admit…I forgot gesso, so I did go to Hobby Lobby a pick up some. 😉

Here’s what I came up with with my meager supplies:

For this project, I used 4 stencils (all 6×6):

TCW584S Peace and Love

TCW587S Mini Receipt

TCW542S-Mini Rug

TCW546S Pods on Sticks

Here is a few steps!

(1) Start with a pre-gessoed page. Using an old gift card, scrape gesso through your Mini Receipt stencil in a few place. This will become background texture so don’t stress about perfection.

(2) Choose 4-5 bright colors of Neocolors or watercolors if you don’t have Neocolors. In addition to these 4, I also added a tangerine color.

(3) Have fun! HINT: to keep your colors from getting blended into a big brown blob, do one color, allow it to almost dry, and then add the next color. This will allow your colors to slightly blend where they meet, but not blend so much that you can’t tell the individual colors.

(4) Keep going until you have covered the entire page. Allow to dry before moving on.

(5) to add more texture, I used my gesso again, but this time through the Mini Rug Stencil. In the end, most of this became covered up, but it adds some great texture and keeps the overall piece from feeling flat.

(6) Using a Scribe-All (or Stabilo) water soluable pencil, grab your Pods on Sticks stencil and begin to trace your shapes.

(7) to allow the “stems” to look connected and the shapes consistent, move your stencil down and align the stems and continue tracing.

(8) to add interest and depth, trace some shapes to that they appear to be “hiding” behind each other.

Color them in however you wish! I went with medium hues since my background is very light.

Here’s where you can personalize it!! You could add words or other shapes or some other drawing. I chose to draw a face.

I wanted it to appear like she was behind my pods, so I drew most her right obscured my the pods.

As you can see in the finished project, I went back into my pods and added white gesso to one side to give them more depth.

I also used my Mini Receipt stencil again and used a light gray acrylic (my sister happened to have some acrylic paints so I just mixed a little black with my gesso) to add some interest to my background. Here you can also see the Mini Receipt stencil we laid down in our background adding a lot of texture to the face.

The quote is from the 6×6 Love and Peace stencil. To get the shadow effect, I used the same gray paint I used earlier to stencil the words. After allowing them to dry, I realigned my stencil back over the words and then shifted them slightly over and down before using my white gesso to stencil them again. This is called the “bump” technique.

So there you go! I hope you will challenge yourself to try this…grab only 4-5 supplies and see what you can come up with. You will be surprised at how far your creativity will take you.

Until next time,

XOXO,

KERI

TCW Design Team and Certified Educator