Monochromatic Rainbow - StencilGirl Creative Team BLOG HOP

Hi, servus and welcome to the "Monochromatic Rainbow" StencilGril Creative Team Blog Hop, dear friends!

The team was challenged for this Blog Hop to pick one colour and use that with just the addition of black or white to create a stencil fun project. I chose my favourite colour - which is orange. As yellow, orange too gives murky tones when being mixed with black. Yellow is even more special as mixing black and yellow gives a dirty green! And as orange is a mix of red and yellow it behaves quite same-ish.

But the result wasn't as mucky as I had feared and trying to use as many various mixes that add different amounts of black to the orange paint as possible helped with still having my "orange" project look quite lively and not too sinister.

I once more went for one of my favourite themes - beetles - to create an ATC trio. But I've made my ATCs double-sided, so you can chose between a "bug-side" and a "Seth (Apter)-side" (as I have used some of Seth's stencils to create the other sides). A list of the stencils used can be found at the bottom of this post (including the links to the stencils in the StencilGirl online store).


I started my ATC trio by cutting six ATCs from black cardstock using my guillotine. ATCs measure
2 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (that's about 6,5cm x 9cm). My plan was to create three double-sided ATCs.
I picked some of the fab StencilGirl ATC backgrounds stencils and as many different orange acrylic paints as I could find in my DecoArt paints stash.

Starting with DecoArt Americana "Jack-O' Lantern Orange", "Snow White" and "Lamp Black" acrylic paints I did the backgrounds for my "Seth-ATCs". I used a mix of the Jack-O' Lantern orange with the Snow White and stencilled the whole ATC using a cosmestic sponge. Then, while the paint was still wet I went in with pure orange and then mixes with black from the bottom and mixes with white from the top to create an ombre effect.

I did the same with the other two ATCs - here's a picture of the stencilled base colour which is the mix of white and orange. I did that to make the colours I was going to add on top pop from the black background.

For the ATC sides with the beetles I used plain white as a base to work on. As you can see I didn't pay attention to just stencil on the shapes of the one bug I had picked. You will see why I did that a bit later.

On top of the white stencilled base colour I went in with a layer of stencilled on DecoArt Chalky Finish paint "heritage" (which is a beautiful vintage orange tone and is also very opaque).

While the beetles were set aside to dry, I continued working on the Seth-side ATCs. As you can see I used the same stencil twice on each ATC - only with moving it lightly to the right and down for the second layer. To intensify the orange look I added a stencilled layer of DecoArt multi-surface Neon "orange" on top.

For some additional texture I used the Neon orange with a different background pattern on top of the previously stencilled one.

Next I added some stencilled words using one of Seth's fab stencils. I stencilled two words in white and one in black and outlined the letters in contrasting colours (or more precisely "not colours" as black and white aren't considered to be colours as they either absorb no or all light and therefore do not have specific wavelengths like the colours do).

Time to have a bit of beetle-painting fun with different tones of oranges - mixed by adding various amounts of black or white.
I used a detail brush and added patterns to the ones that were already there from the design of the beetles stencil.

I also took a picture of my palette so you can see how the orange "behaved" with white and black.

The final touch for my beetles was to add a thin wash of the Neon orange across the whole ATC.
That helped with make the orange tones pop from the black background even more.

I wanted to add a textural element to my ATCs - maybe because I thought of tiny hairy bugs' legs - or simply because I felt my ATCs needed a visual frame. ;)
I cut four pieces of frayed burlap ribbon each for an ATC to build a kind of frame with frayed edges and glued that to a piece of cut out cardboard (from packaging left overs). Once that had dried I glued the finished ATCs to both sides of the "framed cardboard ATC blanks".

I loosely stippled some DecoArt media "Pyrrole Orange" media fluid acrylic paint to the burlap fringe for a finishing touch.

Done!

The starring bug guys: 

Roland
(who is often feeling uncertain)

Percy 

(feels incomplete)

and 

Walter 

(luckily got found by a lovely bug girl) 

The "Seth-sides":

The "Bugs-sides":

Check out all the wonderful artworks in our Creative Team Monochromatic Rainbow Hop:

Shel Cee – Violet

Peg Robinson – Purple

Sue Plumb – Blue

Linda Edkins Wyatt – Green

Jennifer Gallager – Yellow

Claudia Neubacher (this blog here) – Orange

Carol Baxter – Red

Sunila Mahajan & Aditi Mahajan – Gold

Natalie May – White/Black

Debi Adams – Indigo

Comment on the blogs for your chance to win one of the $25 gift certificates for StencilGirlProducts.com.

Contest ends April 27, 2020, at 11:59 p.m. Central Time USA. Winners will be contacted via email the 28th.

List of stencils used on my project here:

- Text and Texture Transform stencil by Seth Apter

- ATC Mixup 1 stencil by Mary Beth Shaw

- ATC Mixup stencil by Seth Apter

- Scarab Beetles stencil by Margaret Peot

Hugs, good luck and happy hopping!

Claudia

xxx