SSS Waves of Change, Painting Stenciled Images Two Ways

 *This post contains affiliate links to Simon Says Stamp.

I was inspired by our trip to the beach to pull out the Waves of Change stencil I designed for Simon Says Stamp last Stamptember.  I'm using it to share two ways to paint with stencils.

For both techniques, you want to spray your stencil with some removable adhesive so that it's tacky and sticks to your paper.  I use Pixie Spray.

This first method uses paste.  The stencil was placed on a panel of watercolor cardstock, and I spread texture paste across the entire stencil.

Once the paste was dry, I used watercolors to paint the paste.  For the waves I used just two shades of blue, but I varied the saturation of those colors between the sections.  

I used a third, lighter shade for the sky.

Often when using paste I like to spread it very evenly, but when I'm going to paint it, I don't mind the extra texture because I think it adds a lot of interest and depth to the painting, you can see that particularly in the sky.

For this next card, after cleaning off my stencil and respraying with Pixie Spray, I again placed it on a piece of watercolor cardstock.

While the stencil was in place, I painted the spaces with watercolors.  Again, just using a couple of shades of blue but varying the saturation.

Neither of these methods is particularly precise, but using this technique, especially with very small areas, you can get a bit of bleed over.

My solution for that is to let the panel dry - not overnight, but dry to the touch.  Then, I take a slightly wet brush and wipe it across the stenciled area.  Be very careful that your brush isn't too wet.  This results in a little bit of ink bleed across the stenciled sections and softens those areas.  It's kind of like when you are inking with a stencil and remove the stencil and ink over the area so you don't have those bright white sections that were covered by the stencil.

I also added a bit of splatter using both of the blue colors as well as white watercolor.

The sentiments for both these cards are from my Waves of Change stamp set.

Again, you won't get a very crisp clean result from these techniques, but a more dynamic, textured look which can be a lot of fun too.

Thanks for stopping by and hope you all had a great fourth!