A Happy Accident!

In my last post, I still thinking “conventionally” about stencils and not finding it very stimulating.  And then I had a happy accident.

Applying all that gel through the stencils would leave a fair bit of gel on the stencil when I removed it.  So, to save the gel, I put one of the stencils down on one of those grey disposable palette papers and scraped the gel off with the knife and put it back in the jar.

The next day, I caught a glimpse of the shape of the stencil on the palette paper.  It was shiny against the matte paper. And a light bulb when off in my head!
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I pulled out a piece of Yupo which I had purchased years ago and disliked because the watercolour just puddled and ran all over the place.  Now, I am thinking that could be a good thing. I applied some watercolour to it and let it dry.  Then I used the stencil to apply gel to the Yupo. Once the gel was dry, I washed the excess watercolour off.  Here is the process:

​Oh, this was fun!  My stencils had been getting more intricate so I started to focus on stencils that would BE the composition rather than just a part.  It was amazing how intricate a stencil the Cricut machine would cut.  Now I was on a roll, creating intricate stencils on the computer and trying out different colour schemes on the Yupo.  Here are a few of the results:

​But the journey didn’t end there! Oh, no!  It had just begun!