Stencil play

I've been having fun playing with stencils on some larger canvases and pieces of card that have been lying around my studio. Each of these three makes use of the technique of removing paint through a stencil using a baby-wipe.

The piece above was fun to do as the cardboard looked smooth on this side. However, when I applied paint with a plastic card, the underlying corrugations started to show through. This made for some interesting unexpected texture.

The silhouette was actually a leftover. When I used a mask cut from a magazine and sprayed it with black ink, I used the ink left on the mask to make a print on greaseproof paper. That's why the colour isn't perfectly smooth.

This canvas is quite large - 30 x 20in - and I've been enjoying adding bits and pieces over time, building up the different colours bit by bit. The canvas has been gessoed over and I removed some of the gesso layer through a hand-cut grid stencil. I then used the same stencil to spray through, print with, and remove paint through. For the moment it is sitting in the studio and I'm deciding whether it's done or not. There are some close-ups at the bottom of this post.

This third one uses mostly the paint removal technique, although there are a couple of pieces of greaseproof paper gelli-print there, too. Not sure if it's finished, yet.