When Stencils Meet Collage

Stencils and collage?  So glad you asked!

Ivy Frame 6, a 6" x 6" stencil, struck me as a good way to embellish the collage below.  Its bottom layer is a Gelli Plate print.  Over that, I developed a collage using red-orange paper, blue-green-yellow mottled paper and foreign script from an old book. Next came the big blue oval, painted with matte medium-diluted acrylic paint.  (Some artists dilute acrylics with water; I use a colorless liquid medium instead, usually opting for matte rather than glossy.)

Last, I added a crown of ivy using dark green acrylic paint.     

Ivy Frame 6 itself looks like this--

Below is a simple collage that incorporates a background paper that I made with acrylic paint and a scraper.  Using a stencil in this way is shown this video of mine.  The stencil used here was my 6" x 6" Kalied.  

Kalied itself looks like this --

Still a different approach to the marriage of stencils and collage is a quick and easy one:  Make a lot of stencil-prints using assorted colors and papers.  Then cut up the papers and combine them.  Each of the collage pieces below was cut from a print made with Garden Montage, a 9" x 11" mask.

Garden Montage in its entirety looks like this:

Once in a while, I alter a paint-stained stencil with scissors, then use it as an element in a mixed-media collage --

The collage above began with diluted paints on Yupo.  After those paints dried, I added the stained stencil, 6" x 6" Sassy Spray.  (Heavy matte medium gel was the adhesive I chose.)  The last step was to add a couple of small bits of paper in the upper left.

Sassy Spray, before it meets paint stain and scissors, looks like this--

With the art sample below, I'm circling back to an artwork like the one at the top of this post.  This is another collage that started with prepared background paper -- in this case, prepared with acrylic paints, texture-making tools and a squeeze bottle of fabric paint.  Over that, I added an old print of mine, created back when I was carving my own rubber stamps.  (Seeing this collage makes me want to dig out that eye rubber stamp to use it again!)  Over that base, I added four pieces of paper.  The fourth piece, printed in bright red-orange-purple on blue, is actually a silhouette of a human figure.  This figure is more easily recognized when you click on the image below to enlarge it.  

The human figure above (red and blue, lower right) was cut from a print made with Small Tangled Pods, a 6" x 6" mask.

Small Tangled Pods looks like this --

Above:  Today's final collage, which includes black-and-white spattered papers printed with 9" x 12" Mimosa Stencil.

Mimosa Stencil itself looks like this --

Thanks for visiting my blog today!  To scroll thru the pages of my StencilGirl stencils and masks, please start here.  To follow this blog by email, please use that option in the upper right sidebar.