Riikka Kovasin - Paperiliitin: Follow Your Dreams, day 1

Moikka, it's again third week of the month, which means a new series for Seth Apter Creative Team. Sadly, this is the last trio for Seth Apter Creative Team as our term is about to end. These past nine months have been a blast! You can find Seth Apter's site here (link) and more about the Creative team here (link). I've included a list of products to the end of the post with links to Seth's own store. While this is the last series for this team, I have enjoyed making these posts so much, that I'm thinking of continuing making some kind of triplets in the future, too. Let me see, what I can come up with!

In the course of the previous posts I have concentrated on different mediums and tools in Seth Apter's repertoire - stamps (link), Izink ICE acrylic glaze (link) and Izink Texture mediums (link). The links take you to the previous series. But what tool was still unexplored were stencils! So, for this last series I concentrated on those. I thought nine ideas to include stencils to a project. Naturally there's so many more, but these nine I could easily tie to a project. Or a series of projects, in a way, as I made a set of ATCs using stencils in a multitude of ways. I've broken the process into three separate videos, which I'll share in the course of the following days. In each, I show a couple of techniques and also make some progress in the ATC set.

In this first video I share four ideas how to use stencils - spray inks, acrylic paints, embossing and acrylic glazes. Three of these are different mediums, while embossing is a technique of other nature. While spray inks and acrylics are basics, I've added a twist to them as well. Or at least I'd like to think that they have a twist, which you may or may not use already. I hope the video will inspire you in any case!

As you could see, the first two techniques are quite basic - adding spray ink and acrylic paint through the stencil. But if you weren't using the flip already, I hope that gave you some ideas! That's also handy if you like the stencil pattern itself. Then you could spray some ink through the stencil to a collage paper and use the flip to the actual project!

The third one is similar to the two before mentioned in many ways - only applying tool differs from acrylic paint. I hope that you get inspiration from the use of different tools and how they affect the thickness of the medium layer - for example. But more over, I'd love to inspire you with different surfaces! Tissue paper for collaging, canvas for base, fabric for layers and embellishments, book paper for layers, cork for a cool effect, felt for softness, transparency for embellishments, wood veneer for base... The only limit to the materials is your imagination!

Where as the previous three are done with mediums through the stencil, the fourth one is using the stencil in another way, without any mediums. I'm using a die cutting machine to emboss the design, but you could also do it by hand, rubbing with a ball point embossing tool. I've also gotten some fun impressions using wet soft paper like paper towel, layering several sheets and then pushing the paper gently into the grooves and letting it dry on top of the stencil. If you try that, please note that the embossed paper can't hold much moisture without the impression disappearing.

I often choose blues together with browns if I'm doing something new or if I have any hesitation about the project I'm creating. While I had some idea what the series will look like in the end and also all the techniques or steps to get me there, there's always a risk of getting something wrong in these long videos or processes. So, I chose to go with my "go to" palette this time, too. I just love the combination of tea tones and blues. I have often said when keeping a workshop, that if you're trying something new, choose a color you like because if nothing else, at least you like the color of the project you've done in the end of the day. In a workshop or in a new situation, you have to be ready for a failure so keeping to some familiar things is a good decision in my mind. Something old, while something new.

What I've also said previously is the use of more than one color when doing layers. If you use just red, you'll get red. But if you add a hint of purple in the mix and let the two colors mix on top of the project rather than mixing them before hand, you'll get an infinite number of different colors. To me, that's magic! You just need to keep the color theory in mind, at least to a certain point, so your whole project won't turn into mud. Unless you want it to!

Please be back tomorrow for another segment of the series! Thank you for stopping by today!