The Crafter's Workshop BlogStencil Illustration

Every now and then, I actually want to create something that I can either hang in my house or give to a friend to hang in theirs. I venture out of my art journal and onto a substrate that can be framed. On this occasion I went for a 13″ x 13″ piece of watercolour card to create this little ray of sunshine!

sunshine face illustration using TCW827 Spring Medallion

– The Crafter’s Workshop provided me with some product to create this project. The opinions I share are solely my own –

If you enjoy seeing a page come together quickly, you can just go ahead and watch the process video below. Captions within the video will tell you what products I have used along the way.

…here is how I created it, step-by-step…

I started with random stenciling, using a number of stencils to create an overall tone of orange/yellow whilst also lending some interest with shape and text… I used a the following 6 stencils:

They all lent their shapes to this background

Background in oranges & pinks using multi layered stencils — Background

Next I chose TCW827 Spring Medallion and TCW9002 – Black Gesso and simply stenciled straight over the background, making sure to leave the centre circle of the stencil blank and blacking in the corners with gesso right into the stencil edge.

Then, I painted in the centre circle and illustrated a peaceful and sunny face using prismacolor pencils

Finally, I added some doodles and spot color around the outer edge. I also used a craft knife to cut the inner flowers partially and lift them forward to add some dimension to the page.