Hi TCW fans! I’m excited to share my project with you today, featuring masks! Now before we get to the photo tutorial, I have a confession to make, I’ve been a little freaked out about the thought of using masks. I get stencils, but masks have always seemed like a different creature to me…instead of putting color through openings you lay color over the entire piece to produce a negative image. And they’re so small…what do you do with these small images? Well…I discovered that the combination of masks and ink sprays are perfection on a piece of paper! Follow along with the super easy steps, shown below:
I started with a plain piece of white, 12×12 cardstock, the Zia Sun Bit (TCW2016) and three coordinating Dylusions Ink Sprays. I laid the mask on the paper, gave one good spritz with an ink spray, and then moved the mask, sprayed again with a different color, etc. Here the first half of my page:
I didn’t want to fully saturate the paper so I only spritzed once each time, which left me with these great little splots of color. I love the look!
Next, I grabbed the Tribal Fish mask…now…technically this is a 6×6 stencil, however, it behaves much more like a mask, in my humble opinion, than a stencil…although you can obviously use a medium to color just inside the lines of the fish. I was pretty excited about the way the sprays mixed with this great design by Julie Fei-Fan Balzer.
This time I used only two ink sprays, that are on the opposite side of the color wheel, for great contrast. And once my sprays were dry I simply gathered up a photo, of my two sweet baby boys, taken many years ago, pretending to fish in the giant rain puddle that used to always form in front of our garage, and a bunch of other misc. supplies. This has to be one of my favorite photos of the boys, and it’s a perfect fit with the sun and fish images.
I added a bunch of designer paper and embellishments in back of and around my photo. Those dreamy, scratchy, black circles you see in the background are new stamp designs from Seth Apter. Black is the perfect neutral color for every art project! Here are a few more photos of my scrapbook layout.
Check out those groovy fish…Love this stencil, ahem, mask. 🙂
The tiny sentiments are from a Tim Holtz Chit Chat sticker book, the chipboard tag is a Wendy Vecchi Art Part, the papers are from an old paper line that I had in my stash, and the paper gears were a freebie from an online store. Lots of fun odds and ends can combine to create a cohesive layout.

I hope you enjoyed today’s post and you were inspired to try out masks and ink sprays. Happy crafting!

Kim