Gone to the Birds!

I love paintings birds as a break from my trees.  Over the years, I have used various techniques to bring my birds to life: Gouache and Ink Resist, mixed media and acrylic.  I have painted them for friends, shows and fund-raisers. Here is a sampling of my bird paintings:

The flowers are very interesting and have yielded a few good pieces in my explorations but I would like to integrate the background better with the subject and layer the stencils to develop more complex images.  I think birds would give me more opportunity to do that, so for now I am going to work with them.

I started creating stencils of branches.  I am amazed at how intricate a stencil the Cricut machine can cut.  By now it was taking me 3 to 5 hours of working with an image on the computer to create the digital file for the Cricut.  Fortunately, I enjoy that part of the process and have good computer skills.

I created a few simple masks of sparrows to combine with the other stencils. (A stencil and a mask are opposites of each other.  When you paint through a stencil, you create the subject.  When you use a mask, you paint around the subject – negative painting.) I set up my Gelli plate and pulled out my Open acrylics.  I started just using copy paper to play around and experiment with, and then expanded to cardstock. 
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Here are some of the early experiments. In general, I used two stencils with two colours. Some were printed directly and some were “ghost prints”.  In some, I enhanced the images of the birds with graphite or watercolour pencil:

So these are experiments on cardstock - sorting out the process and refine the images.  Cardstock prints well but has issues with anything with water in it.  It buckles.  I needed a better, more permanent paper to work with.  Stay tuned for the results of my paper experiments and some more information about the process itself!