News from the mushroom - stencil

News from the Mushroom - hand-made stencil

Materials: I did not have a roll of acetate on hand but I did save the acetate sheets that some stickers came on, so I used those to make the stencils. I used a Styrofoam meat tray as a cutting board. And I did not have an X-acto knife, so I used the flat blade on my Speedball lino cutter.

First, I sketched out some mushroom shapes in my journal. Then it was time to trace the patterns on the acetate. It was hard finding something that marked on the plastic. After several experiments, I found this silver Sharpie worked well.

For this big mushroom with the little one attached, I made two separate stencils.

I carefully cut out the shapes with the Speedball lino cutter using the old Styrofoam tray as the cutting mat.

I used tape to hold the stencil in place. I inked the mushroom using a StazOn ink pad. This is a lovely orange one.

On the smaller mushroom, I used yellow ink first and then a bit of the orange to get a lighter stem and cap.

I repeated the process with the other two mushrooms using a light and a dark green ink pad.

For the background, I added just a touch of watercolor.