Hello friends! I’m so excited to be sharing my first design team post! What a delight to be joining the TCW team…it’s a great delight! For those who don’t know me, my name is Kim Schofield and you can see more of my work on my blog, Paperie Petals.

And now on to today’s project! Let me first say that I am a huge TCW fan, and have been for many years. Stencils are one of my favorite crafting tool and one that I use in almost all of my projects. For today’s creation, I started with the following:

A Dick Blick Artist’s Board…these are great pieces to work on as it’s basically a flat, hard canvas. You can purchase a box of these and it will take up barely any room in your studio. I use Liquidtex Matte Gel Medium to attach printed tissue paper to the canvas board. I then use watered down gesso to whitewash the entire piece, which helps to knock the dark print back into the background.

You can see how the print on the left side of my canvas is slightly lighter once I added the watered down gesso.

Once the gesso was dry, I grabbed my stencils and some embossing paste. My favorite paste is Wendy Vecchi’s embossing paste, but I also had some Prima paste on hand as well. My first layer of paste included designs from the Halftone Circles, Kasias Letters, and Chevron stencils.

Here you can see the dried embossing paste…because I never clean my stencils and some of the dried paint transferred to the canvas. (Insert cheesy grin) No worries, the entire piece is going to be covered with paint. I opted to see a combination of Dylusions paints and Distress paints; both were applied and blended with baby wipes.

Here’s the piece with the addition of the paint colors…humm…a little too bright for me…

Nothing that a little Archival Ink (Potting Soil), used because it’s going over paint and Distress Ink won’t stick to the paint, can’t solve! Oh, how I love me some brown ink! Makes those stenciled areas really pop.

And life wouldn’t be complete with some kind of splatter! This time I got some help from watered down gesso and a big brush, for big splats.

At this point I knew I wanted to add a photo of my sweet boys to this canvas, but I couldn’t move forward with adding some black. Adding any neutral, white, black, gray, is the perfect finishing touch for any project. And I had to use my favorite stencil, Believe Script, which I use on almost everything I create. (I promise to use other stencils too! Can you see how dirty that stencil is? Perfection!)

The last part of my project was to add a few layers of papers (even using another favorite stencil, Tiny Circles, on the teal paper) and embellishments; tags, paper clip, lace, a sentiment, and some copper pearls. (Although this is a new project, the photo is from last year, hence the 2015 date).

Here’s my completed canvas! I hope that you enjoyed today’s project. Please feel free to leave a comment or question. Thanks so much, happy crafting!