Folk art floral stencils, the quick way to card

August kinda got away from me there. I spent quite a bit of August looking for a part time job, landed one only for it to pan out in a completely different direction than planned, so I had to abandon that. Back to paddling my own canoe for a while. I’d love to be at the point where running my own business was all I needed to do, but it takes a long time for new businesses to support themselves and we are not just at that point yet. Some day.

Since abandoning ship though, I threw myself into a wee project that was dancing about in my head this last while – folk art flowers. I intended to make one stencil and I ended up with 4 sets of two layered stencils.

I always start sketching with whatever is nearest to me, never really got into a sketchbook groove. Usually I’ll raid the printer paper stack and grab a biro, so my sketch collection is not really display worthy, it’s just a stack of tea cup ringed, biro scribbles, much like this. In between sketches there will be notes, often day to day stuff like what time I have to pick somebody up at, a telephone number for the dentist etc. It’s a little chaotic and not pretty. I’ve always envied folks with beautiful sketchpads full of stunning art. No can do. I’ll move quickly into drawing on the computer, that’s kinda where I live unless I’m doing watercolours.

I love a straight line, or an elegant curve, I love sharp edges, defined shape, communication quickly. Designing stencils indulges the graphic designer in me, my favourite thing was always drawing logos. Simple shapes that communicate the most ideas are my thing….but…I also love fuss and ornamentation, more is more is also my thing. Stencilling is interesting because you can sort of have both things together. The overall shape of this stencil design are quite simple, you can keep this image simple if you keep to just two colours, or you can make this shape busy if you use lots of different colours on different parts of the stencil, like I did here.

You can vary the tone of each colour in different areas depending on how much colour you brush on, and how often you brush in a particular direction. Colour collects in different areas of the stencil like snow drifting agains the hedge, it’s fascinating and it gives each image a lovely illustrated look.

Every time I design something, I pretty much design it for myself – I know, I should be thinking about what other people might want, but I have a really hard time working that out, so I mostly answer my own questions. One of my most frequently asked (of myself) questions is “how can I make something that looks like I put in a lot of work, but quickly?” These floral stencils do that for me. I made a series of them, each flower is large enough to be a main feature on the front of a card. One of them is a panel that fills a card entirely.

Once the stencil is cut, it is the work of moments to colour it with a brush and an ink pad. I can do a one colour version if I’m really short of time, but the results look fab I think. Also, because it’s a stencil I can mass produce things, a wee bundle of notecards for example, for a gift. Everyone is getting handmade from me this Christmas!

The stencil in the post is Folk Flower stencil 1 and honestly I spent more time choosing ink colours than actually making the card. Super fast, but I think it looks considered and like it took a bit of time – what do you think?

This is what the set of stencils look like and soon as I find my camera stand there will be a video.