The Rabbit Hole of 2022

This rabbit hole had two inspirations.  The first was a workshop I was asked to teach in Osoyoos in February on Impressions of Nature.  It was going to be an in-person workshop on stencils and moulds but COVID converted it to online classes on more conventional topics.  But I created a couple of demo videos (one of the videos is at the end of this post) in preparation and that got me thinking.
 
Then, I was talking to my Central Okanagan FCA mentees about Repetition with Variation and it got me thinking about the greater use of stencils.  I discovered that you can cut your own custom stencils on a Cricut cutter, creating or refining your images on the computer and then using the machine to cut the stencils themselves.
 
So, I got a Cricut machine and started to explore, creating stencils that are more intricate than those that I could cut by hand.  I discovered that I really enjoy creating the digital part of the stencil from my photos and using Photoshop to modify and refine. A lot of the design and most of the composition decisions are made here. The Cricut machine allows me to cut the same stencil in different sizes and you can play with just a part of a stencil so there are lots of ways to use a single digital image.
 
Here is an example of a more intricate stencil I made:

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The next installment will be about my explorations of using my new stencils!

This video was made as a promotion for a course that never happened but it shows where I started.