In 2013 – 2014 I was really interested in working with shapes found on circuit boards. I liked the designs of the boards and I also liked the idea of building Sci-fi worlds. I made a piece using a couple different stencils, which I printed in layers. This made it easier to create distinct colors in specific areas. I used a different color acrylic for each layer and printed it on a black piece of cardstock. First I did the blue gray layer, then added the white with a second stencil. The overall image is roughly 16″ x 20″.
The dark background added to the futuristic idea and reminded me of 80s movies like Blade runner and Terminator. Having a couple different stencils meant that I had to think about registration, or how to line up the different stencils so that the different layers sync up.
Alot of the work I was making at that time was done on paper, printed and painted. I was cutting it, tearing it, collaging it and layering it. While the circuit piece was done using a traditional stencil that I cutout with an Xacto knife, this larger maze-inspired work in progress was made using masking tape. I had taken a sheet of paper that had already been painted blue and taped over it to create the maze of verticals and horizontals. Then I applyed black paint. After peeling off the tape mask the original blue paint layer was still visible underneath.
I was using mostly straight pieces of tape but here in the middle of this photo above you can see there were a couple pieces of tape that I tore to make irregular strands. Doing this adds an organic quality to the mask and also gets away from the repetitive tape edges.
Pieces of paper can also be shaped and assembled and then attached over a paint surface to build a mask. Adding pieces of paper (like the ones below) and then taping over them or lightly gluing them to the surface creates more opportunities for unique masking of the art surface.
