Quick and easy folk art trees, with stencils

I’ve made a bunch of new stencils for the store recently (see here). This one is a bit of an obsession. It’s called Folk Art Trees 1 because I’m planning more. Super simple, so simple that I made a ton of cards in one sitting, here’s a few pics from the process of this card. I also used the Checkerboard borders stencil to get the little block border around the outside of the card. I really love how the inks look almost like soft pencil shading, or soft watercolouring, I felt very artsy making this.

The tree is ridiculously easy, you just position the stencil, brush on your colour (pic 1, top left) and then you can decide if you want to go in with the secondary part of the stencil to give shadows (pic 2).

I’m using a prototype in these pics, so my tree trunk grain is under the main tree boughs, but here is what the stencil looks like now that I’ve finished the revisions. The left hand cut-out is the full tree, the right hand side cut out is the tree detail. you could actually use these independently but I’ve used them together so far. Included with the stencil are the negative cut shapes of the. tree, which are useful for masking.

I stated with a piece of yellow card, cut to 4.25 by 5.5 inches and i brushed on a little stronger yellow ink around the edges (Daffodil delight from SU). The main tree was brushed in green (certainly celery SU) and the underside of the boughs was brushed in a blue shade (Baja breeze SU) The tree trunk was a rich coffee shade of brown.

Changing to the Checkerboard border stencils I used one of the frames, which is slightly smaller than the card, to mask a border around the edge of the card, which i brushed in the green. It’s then super simple to lay over the indented frame and brush again in the blue, to get that cool checkerboard effect, I absolutely love this combination for making simple frames around my card to match the focal point. I brushed a little brown around the edge also to give some nice variation. I love the thinness of the frame, it picks up the colour detail without being overpowering.

The last things I added were a sentiment (from my latest stamp set Mush love) and some teeny tiny squirrels from an old WMS set, Cottage Garden. Hope it tickles!