Who doesn’t love a Kaleidoscope? I still have one that my dad made me years ago, lovingly carved out of wood. It’s on my bookshelf where I see it daily and am reminded how fragile life is, like the Kaleidoscope, one small turn and all the colors and patterns shift, never the same again. When Cecilia Swatton wanted to design a series of Kaleidoscope stencils for us, we jumped at the idea. How fun is this going to be?
Welcome to Kaleidoscope! I had a lot of fun with these stencils, I played with so many mediums and techniques, it was hard to decide which ones to show you. (Oh, and I have so many more planned!)
I knew, in addition to my go-to techniques with gelli printing and spraying and art journaling, I wanted to do something with fabric. I’ve seen some cool fabric-marking techniques lately and I wanted to try something… in my head it was awesome. A colorful shimmery burst of fireworks on a black fabric background. Hmm. Could it possible work? I ripped down a black fabric square to about 15″ x 15″ and got out my Shiva Paintsticks, stencils, and stencil brushes.
I started to randomly stencil, starting out with more subdued colors, starting in the center of the stencil, and gradually feathering out toward the edge (so I didn’t get that square stencil edge in there.)
I just continued with the different designs, filling in the spaces as needed. After a LOT of muscle work swirling those stencil brushes, I got this:
I have to say… I wasn’t sure my idea would work or what I actually got would match what was in my head, but my muse was kind to me and I LOVE the result! It’s shimmery, subtle and bold at the same time. Now I just have to let it “cure” for a few days before I heat set it and decide what to do with it! (That’s the hard part for me… any suggestions? To me, it’s a piece of art in it’s own right.) Here are some close-ups of the details:
Project No. 2 involved a class with Jodi Ohl called Grunge Ink. One of the techniques involved a subtractive process, you roll down layers of ink, place the stencil over and wipe ink away. I LOVE how this turned out, very subtle and texturey, buried between layers of ink.
I have a million prints I made with the gelli plate, the best ones were used for our ads and banners. I also have journal pages, doodles, sprays… the good, the bad, the ugly. But I’ll save those for another time 
Now the good part… join us this coming week for a blog hop with some awesome artists! Everyone will be featuring Kaleidoscope and every stop will be giving away a FREE set of stencils to a lucky winner. Read each blog for the details, for this one, just leave a comment – you can tell me what they remind you of, how you would use them, what is your favorite technique you would use with them. I will close comments Nov. 1st here. Each stop will be announced on our FB page the next 7 days.
