Once you’ve gathered all your materials, you will then decide what shape or shapes you want to use for your stencil. I recommend drawing them onto the paper before cutting out so that you have some initial guidelines. Then you’re ready to start cutting!
Step 1: Setup your cutting board and assemble your tools.
Step 2: Take your Xacto and start cutting. When positioning the xacto knife, try to keep the blade mostly parallel to the cutting surface. This minimizes the chance of dulling the blade prematurely.
Step 3: Once you have your shape cutout, set it aside near your stencil. You’ll use this later as a mask to go with your stencil.
Step 4: Put a small amount of paint down on your palette surface and dab your brush in the paint. (I like to use a glass palette because it stays in place and also makes cleanup easier.) Keep dabbing it until you get a good even coverage of paint on the brush. It’s important not to overload the brush with paint.
Step 5: Lay your stencil over your artwork surface. Secure it in place with your hand so that it doesn’t move when applying paint. You can also tape it to your artwork surface.
Step 6: Once you have the stencil secured you can begin to carefully apply the paint over the opening. When doing this try to keep the brush perpendicular to your paper surface. Notice how the texture changes as your brush begins to run out of paint. You can use that to create some variation in the print as desired.
Step 7: Once you have painted over the entire stencil opening you can carefully lift up the paper. Be careful not to slide the paper as there could be excess paint around the edges of the stencil.
At this point you have alot of different options to explore. In the next post I’ll talk about masking using the piece that you cut out from your stencil!