A Happy New Discovery -- StencilGirl Stencils

Although I was unable to attend either of the 2012 Pat Dews' wokshops for which I had registerd, nonetheless, signing up for them rekindled my fascination with play-tools used in mixed-media art-making.  This interest was heightened by Pat's kindly personal invitation to meet her at a recent award ceremony of the New Jersey Watercolor Society, which now -- fortunately for me -- meets in my figurative backyard, at Middletown Arts Center.  (If you take NJ Transit from any of the Shore Points to NYC, you ride past this art center every time you pass the Middletown Train Station.  These two buildings are rock-throwing distance apart.  Not that I'm suggesting you throw any ...!)

Not long after meeting Pat -- voila! -- I came across the most happy discovery of StencilGirl stencils, the brain-child of Mary Beth Shaw, whose name was already in my vocabulary since I often refer to her book on mixed-media artmaking.   I placed my order and quickly received high-quality plastic stencils that my fingers are itching to use.

My art-world experience was launched in college, in the prehistoric days before popularized computer use, when my major was labeled "commercial art."  ("Graphic design," I think, is the modern label.)  My focus during that era was representational art.  By 1995, however, I had been bitten by a different bug and came down with a full-blown mania for nonobjective abstract art using mixed media.  The fever has never gone down.

Thanks to creative minds like those behind StencilGirl, it never will.