Zensdays: Stenciling and Tangling

This week's diva challenge is UMT which stands for Use My Tangle ...Laura Harms randomly chooses someone's tangle and we incorporate it into our tile. This week's tangle is "FANZ" by Susan Goetter and click HERE to find out more about the diva's challenge and find the links for Susan's fan design. Wayne used it on a portion of the leaves on our creation.

This week I did a stenciling tutorial and Wayne did the tangle creation afterwards. We actually did this in black and white last week, but when I saw the challenge for this week I thought it would be fun to do the design in color by stenciling the flower. See below to see how it was done. Just need to let you know that the stencil was discontinued several years ago. It is an arts and crafts tile design called Chrysanthemum and Dreamweaver had it as a brass stencil design in 2003. I have a handful of them left and if you are interested in having one I am having a random drawing from those commenters on my blog who indicate they want the stencil. All you have to do is at the end of your comment write..."I'm IN"! And...I will ship overseas.

First I traced the design with an 01 Micron pen by Sakura. One thing you need to be aware of ...is this stencil is made out of brass and as such can create havoc with your pens if you are heavy handed. Be sure to hold the pen perpendicular to your paper surface as shown here and don't angle it, otherwise you can slice the nib of the pen with the pressure against the metal stencil edge. I tend to be pretty hard on pens and using a light touch doesn't come easy to me. I have had to practice and pay attention to not pressing too hard when tracing the design of these intricate stencils. If you are aware of this it will be much easier to make it through the tracing process without ruining a pen. In fact using an 005 pen is even better because some of the openings of the stencil are really tiny and minute...so as you get better using this finer tipped pen makes it easier to achieve the detail you want.

I am using pigment ink...dye ink works better for this because it is less likely to clog your micron pens but it was all I had at the time. The paper towel is for off-loading the excess ink into, don't be afraid to push hard. This moves the ink up into your bristles and keeps the brush "dry" ...hence the term dry-brush technique. If you practice this a bit on scrap paper first you can get an idea how wet your ink pad is and how much wetness you need to work out of your brush. First I laid a base of yellow and then worked with green shading it into the yellow, and to dull the colors I next used red so the colors ended up a bit dull and more authentic to the Arts and Crafts time period.

Stenciling fuchsia with a very light touch will give you a base to make a purple with a light loading of blue for the last coat of color.

Now remove the stencil for this next step. The process of blacking in the background started by using an 03 Micron pen. This pen has a slightly thicker nib and then in the next step use a marker type of nib. I know some people even use "Sharpie" pens to do lots of blacking so they can preserve their finer pens, but as you can see in the picture below I used a Micron "Graphic 1".

I actually like the image just stenciled without any of the tangle work. I did a couple of these and tested my skills with the "FANZ" challenge tangle, but alas I was running out of time and I wanted to get this up for you to see, so Wayne saved me on this one and did the tangle work. He's a CZT and rarely tells anyone, but he is a fabulous teacher and is very encouraging. He usually cheers me on, but on this occasion he buckled to my need for getting the job done and did a great job. But I have to say the real masterpiece is the one he did on his Flickr site, you can interpret it a couple of ways, but I saw a sunflower in his finished piece. So take a minute to see the work he did for the challenge this week and leave a comment if you have time. Don't forget to write "I'm IN!" if you want to join the random drawing for this stencil. I will announce the winners by Sunday evening.

Three Random Winners

Last Zensday I gave commenters the opportunity to win a discontinued metal stencil of an Arts and Crafts tile stencil design ...all you had to do was comment and say, "I'm IN" at the end. Here are the three winners:

1 Art Lady Kate, Tangles and More

Jean Chaney

and

Christine Springer

Please email your snail mail to:

lynell@dreamweaverstencils.com
(I won't have time to ship it until the end of this week.)