I spend probably WAY too much time engaged in random googling and assorted web surfing….BUT, it’s all good. Recently, while searching the term “stencils” on Etsy I can across this intriguing shop KMStitchery She specializes in “eco-friendly feminist fashion”, designing and cutting her own stencils (cool!) of prominent feminist icons and painting them on recycled clothing. I had to feature this because a) it’s stenciling, and b) I love this women’s attitude!

She has a blog here. Good point about American Apparel. Their ads are seriously creepy! Bleeech!

OOOPs! Well I thought I had posts all set to appear while I was on my Spain/Morocco trip, but in my haste to get everything done the night before I neglected to select “publish” and produced a lot of dead air time. SO-while I recover from jet lag, do laundry, catch up on bills, edit my photos for Flickr and try to ease back into my “real” world, I’ll let a couple of these fly…… 

I love the look of the carved Jali sandstone in these pages fromAlberto Pinto Orientalism (fab book BTW!).

  

I can’t tell if they are real or painted carvings….

but this look is easily achieved with a single-overlay stenciling and some careful attention to shading with a stencil brush.

I featured in my book, Painted Illusions, and it’s also detailed out in this DVD on Advanced Shading and Shadowing and this one on Furniture and Floor techniques. If you do it on a textured sureface or apply decorative finishing techniques to create the look of stone before adding the stenciling it makes the illusion seem even more real. It works great on wood too! The designs shown above are the Italianate Border, Italian Medallion and Reverse Scroll and can be found here!

Do you know of Suzanis? Even if you don’t, there is a very good chance that you have been seeing images of them in home fashion magazines and on the design blogs for the past year or so. I wrote this little post myself on the Art of Living last July. With the trend toward brighter colors and ethnic influences you will probably be noticing them even more. Suzanis are very colorful, elaborately embroidered silk wall hangings or bed coverings that originated in central Asia, primarily in what is now Uzbekistan. The name Suzani is actually derived from the Persian word for needle. There is a very informative article online here. Maryam collects antique Suzanis and plans to use them extensively throughout Peacock Pavillions and as I said they will also be used as the inspiration for the stencil art we will be applying there. I thought you might like to see some of the range of patterns we have been looking at for inspiration.

One of my favorite inspiration sites that I have written about here before is Marla Mallet’s. The link takes you directly to the page on Central Asian embroideries, but there is much, much more to see if antique rugs, fabrics and embroideries make you weak in the knees. Be prepared! There are both new and antique Suzanis for sale on this site, but Maryam advises that they are now using child labor to meet the demand for the newer ones, so she only invests in the antiques.

It makes for quite a hard decision when each pattern and colorway seems prettier than the last! With so many beautiful options, which will it be?? Oh, wait and see….

PS The middle design is not a Suzani, it is antique printed linen, but of a similar look and motif.

So the “Old World” look is out in some circles, but I still can’t help partake in the joys of what you can create with a trowel and some type of plaster product. It’s especially fun to work with the “touch” of the trowel (and your arm that is attached to it) to layer materials that create the look of passing time.

This finish uses our Acanthus Damask stencil design and is troweled through with a mix of paint and joint compound in various colors and layers. The fun thing is that you have to apply it “not perfectly” so there is lots of wriggle room. You don’t want to get too sloppy but…

This is my new favorite wall finish. I just have a thing for embossed leather looks. This is the Folk Flower Allover stencil that is embossed and then buried with paint, Venetian Plaster, stain and wax. Both of these finishes will be incorporated into an Extraordinary Stenciled Effects class here a the studio starting in December-the first one in a few years!

There are four different stencil collections (5 designs each) coming in the Modern Masters line: Ornamental, Global, Botanical and Far East. This was one of my favorite designs/finishes that I plan to work into my home office “Kimono” walls.

I love combining patterns in a finish and thought these two came together really well. The center band is Shimmerstone that has been stria’d and backfilled, with the Cherry Blossom border design dropped in randomly. I found the Shimmerstone to be a really nice surface to stencil on, particularly with the Metallic Paint Collection colors, which were used straight out of the bottle.

  I love the way that you can almost effortlessly create shading and subtle color variations with a dry-brush stencil technique!

One of my reasons for starting a blog is that I thought it would be fun to track my ongoing projects online. Great idea in theory! I am just wrapping up a project that was so intense and time consuming that I didn’t really have time to blog about it-or much else for that matter!

Due to the nature of my business-selling designs and new ideas for decorative painters-it naturally follows that I have always featured and thus promoted the products that I use for my techniques. BIG bonus for them. When Modern Masters recently approached me about hiring me to produce a line of stencils and series of finishes that incorporates their decorative finishing product line, of course I said yes. Designing finishes is what I do. Getting paid?? Great concept!

So, 20 new stencil designs and 36 photographed step-by-step finishes later (yes, 36!) I now have the time and energy to write about it. Each finish was done on a large piece of styrene in my studio. With my trusty tripod and camera set to 10 seconds I was able to get hundreds of photographs of me in unflattering positions holding a brush, a roller, a trowel, cheesecloth, etc. Fortunately, we are cropping me OUT of all photos!

I did develop a fondness for the sponge roller, shown above, as we were able to get some really pretty paint finishes by layering and softening colors. This one was just Metallic Pearl over an off-white paint in a couple of layers that creates a soft, organic texture with a lot of depth. I have learned to love easy!