Playing with stencils

I love stamps and stencils, and although there are tons of beautiful ones out there to buy, making your own is much more fun and you'll never have to worry about copyright and can be sure that they'll be unique.

I've been inspired by two classes to get my cutting board and knife out again. I mostly use sheets of transparencies to make my stencils. Their A4 size is large enough to make a bigger stencil and they're easy to cut but sturdy enough to paint over them. Depending on how elaborate and detailed you want your stencil to be, you can either take your time to draw the design on a separate sheet of paper and then trace it on to your transparent. Or you can just take a waterproof pen and draw it on to the transparent directly, which is what I did here.

I got my big Moleskine journal out one evening earlier this week, and just quickly and randomly put some paint down and while that was drying, I cut out the stencil. I used paint with it, which of course works perfectly fine, but I went to the art shop in my lunch time the next day to get two cans of spray paint to try out. It gives good opague and even layer, and I really like the result.

I'm still trying to do something creative every day, but I'm not always succeeding. Now, that the semester started again, and the university is filled with so many more people, I'm finding it much more difficult to sit in the cafeteria to draw and feel comfortable with it (which I already don't really feel even when there's only few people around). And then there's so many other things getting in the way sometimes, many of them things that I enjoy doing too. And that's fine. As long as I remember to sit down and paint or draw something - or carve a stamp or cut a stencil - as often as possible, even if it isn't every single day.