January 10th, 2013

Stencil Star: Heather Sanders

 Another fantastic  Stencil Stars™ showcase! Our latest Stencil Star is Texas-based Heather Sanders of 5th Wall Surface Design, an incredibly talented artist who applies stenciled design patterns in creative ways on various surfaces.  We’re proud to feature her stenciled decorative painting projects! We love to share our customer’s use of our Royal Design Studio mylar wall stencils and Modello™ masking stencils on walls, ceilings, floors and more and are always looking for new artist’s to feature. Don’t be shy…..shoot us an email with YOUR projects and you could see yourself featured here too!

This outstanding feature arch and wall had a little help from a Modello® Designs Eastern Border vinyl stencil (EasBor344) along with handpainted elements and Swarovski crystals! We love the dreamy colors and find this a great way to accent a nice niche!

ABOUT HEATHER SANDERS

Heather has been working in the decorative arts industry for over 10 years now.  She and her partner Sam manage their decorative finish studio, 5th Wall Surface Design.  They enjoy the interaction with their clients almost as much as they love the work they do! Based in Rollingswood, Texas, their company offers a full-range of decorative and stencil finishes.

Stunning Modello™ Designs Marquetry finish using our MarqAll105 pattern — you can see how amazing the results are! You can learn this faux marquetry technique for wood, cork and more with our fab tutorial manual.

What draws you to Stenciling?

I will admit that when I first started in the decorative painting world, I refused to use stencils.  I felt that it was “cheating” in a way.  And I spent hours laboriously hand painting the same scrolls and flowers that I now employ in my stencil work.  At some point, it occurred to me that despite the cost of the stencils, I could save a LOT of money on labor, and also achieve a very clean, exact design.

After our first custom order,  I was hooked!  I also realized that I could add hand painted detail to the stencil work, but not spend hours measuring and making templates.  I love the ease of use and the fact that I can achieve a beautiful “custom” work of art in a matter of hours now with Modello® Designs.

(above) An incredible ceiling that add depth and size with pattern!  A Modello™ Designs Ornamental Center vinyl stencil was used with a wonderful neutral color scheme! (below) A different Modello® ornamental center stencil pattern graces a ceiling with a striking color scheme.  You can see how Heather uses color and pattern expertly to add great interest and dimension to spaces and places that are calling out for attention!

How do you determine which pattern will work for your project?

There are many factors that influence our pattern choice.  Of course, the customer’s style is first and foremost.  We take into account the scale of the room and area to be embellished.  We also look at repetitive patterns occurring in the drapery, floors, furniture, etc…  I also have certain stencils that have become my “go to” designs when all else fails.

The Large Feathered Damask stencil from the Allover Ethnic Stencils Collection adds fantastic color and pattern to this space. Heather used a “drop shadow” stencil technique to add extra dimension to this look. Find out how to create a drop shadow stencil technique on our website here!

Please share your top Stenciling tip with us.

My favorite method (right now) is to do a base of plaster, because it seals up the stencil and doesn’t bleed like paints and glazes do.  It  adds a beautiful dimension to the design.  It also gives me a raised surface to add hand painted work to, which cuts down on the touch ups.

(above) One of our Modello™ Designs Ornamental Center stencils (OrnCen170) pulls double duty! On the left is a beautiful plastered hood and the right has the design stenciled onto glass. (below) An incredible rusted dome ceiling created with Modern Masters Metal Effects products and our Floral Medallion Stencil Set B.

Heather and Sam of 5th Wall Surface Design are truly creative with patterns on any surface and we always love to see their gorgeous work with our stencil designs!  Do be sure to keep up with them on their Facebook page, 5th Wall Surface Design.  Many thanks to them both for sharing their finishes and projects with both our Royal Design Studio stencils and our Modello vinyl stencil patterns!

Don’t forget to pin these images to your boards for inspiration — and check out our Pinterest collection of design, pattern and finish ideas! You can always catch great new projects in our Facebook page, too!

April 27th, 2011

Dreamy Stencil Cremes

Well, I’ve finally gone and done it. For the first time in my long and stencil-y life I have my very own vanity signature line of stencil paint: Royal Stencil Cremes. Available now for your stenciling pleasure in 10 deliciously shiny and sassy metallic colors.

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You can read all about how fabulous Royal Stencil Creme paints are for stenciling projects here in this handy “How to Use Royal Stencil Cremes” booklet that my talented creative assistant Lauren and I created for you. Meanwhile, I just wanted to share part of a DIY Stencil project that Lauren was keen to do for her own apartment.

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You see, Lauren is a very stylish girl with a fabulous jewelry collection culled from assorted Etsy artisans, and she wanted to create a special space to store them within easy reach.

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So, we gathered some supplies including a cork board, foam roller, stencil brush, 1″ Blue Painter’s Tape, NEW Royal Stencil Creme colors, and a Japanese Scallops stencil from Royal Design Studio-one of her favorites.

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First things first, we got ourselves some good quality paint to basecoat the cork board. I know that some people like to cheap out on paint, but seriously, it’s not worth it! Good paint will cover better, and even out nicely. We got Behr’s Premium Plus paint in Ultra White right off the shelf at Home Depot. Two coats did it.

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A general rule with stenciling is that “a little paint goes a long way”. With Royal Stencil Cream colors, a little paint goes a REALLY long way. (That’s a good thing) It is very important to use a very “dry” brush to keep excess paint from seeping under the stencil edges. Lauren put just a small amount of Stencil Creme out on a paper or plastic plate and dipped  just the tips of the brush into the paint. Then she rubbed a bit on a clean part of the plate and offloaded EVEN MORE paint on a stack of good paper towels. The idea is to make sure the paint is distributed evenly throughout the brush bristles AND make sure that the brush doesn’t have an excessive amount of paint left on it. Trust me, you won’t need it.

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Lauren centered the stencil on the cork board (see detailed instructions) and filled in the open stencil areas. Smart girl that she is, she waited until the brush was a bit dryer before moving to the edges and pushing the stencil into the corners-again avoiding paint “run-unders”. It’s so much funner NOT to have to do touchups. Note: If you EVER see nicely painted finger nails in a photo on here, you will know it’s NOT me!

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The Royal Stencil Creme colors also work great for regular painting. Two thin coats around the frame (note the protective tape) covered the frame quite nicely. OK, so this was the short and sweet version. For the long, detailed version of this DIY stencil project click here.

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Lauren used T-pins (Office Depot) to hang some of her favorite coordinating jewelry pieces. Yes, I’m jealous. Until she decides where on the wall to permanently hang the board, she just has it leaning up against the wall, which seems perfectly fine too! I was thinking if you have a lot of nice jewelry and plenty of wall space it would be super fun to create a series of boards in different patterns and colors and put together some curated jewelry collections on them. If you are someone who has that jewelry making and selling gene, this would make for some interesting displays!

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Like I said, you can read all the details about Royal Stencil Creme colors here, but I just wanted to show you how beautiful the Antique Gold color worked on this woven placemat. It pretty much covered in one coat (OK, I DID add a tiny bit more here and there) and you can see how wonderfully crispy and clean the edges are. I am a very crispy and clean kind of girl, so this thrills me. Now, I’ve been doing this for awhile, but seriously, the Stencil Cremes are designed to make stenciling easy for beginners, pros, and everyone in between.

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Would you love to be able to see all the colors firsthand? We have a card for that! We will send you a FREE hand painted color card with any Royal Design Studio stencil web order. Just be sure to check the order box on this page or ask for it if you call us.

Here are the handy links again:
Royal Stencil Creme Colors
Introduction to Royal Stencil Cremes
DIY Stencil Project: Jewelry Cork Board

October 26th, 2009

High Style in High Point

My good friend, Barb Skivington, has undeniably one of the loveliest decorative finishing teaching studios in the whole country-Faux Works Studio in High Point, NC. Besides a state-of-the-art studio area, it also includes an elegant showroom full of interesting decorative treatments. Many of the featured treatments incorporate Modello patterns. Am I biased? Maybe. Are they fabulous? Definitely. Take a look…

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Multiple Modern Allover patterns are worked into an allover metallic wall treatment. The tile idea is a great way to work in different patterns and slight color variations while maintaining a cohesive look, don’t you think??

Coffee-Bar

This is one of our exclusive Marquetry patterns, MarqAll106 done on cork tiles in the coffee bar area. One of the benefits of staining pattern on unfinished cork tiles (as we did also in our showroom spaces at Modello Designs) is that you can do the pattern work prior to installation-much easier than working down on the floor!

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An allover Eastern Lattice pattern, EasAll106, painted on a table in the teaching studio.

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Some custom Typography to define different workshops and the unique finishes that Barb teaches.

Barb will be teaching one of her famous cabinet finishes classes here at our San Diego studio this November. The class is sold out, but you can find Barb teaching both at her own studio and other great studios around the country throughout the year-including a “date-to-be determined” back here in San Diego. Just check the Workshop page on the Faux Works Studio website.

March 28th, 2008

Bamboo Forest Floor

We are closing in on getting all of our floors finished up in the new building-all 8300 square feet of them! We’ve done cork, wood and LOTS of decorative concrete. Our latest concrete floor project for our laser cutting room was inspired by this rug picture:

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I wanted to do something organic and VERY different, so I reworked our Royal Design Studio Bamboo stencil into a Bamboo Forest that we cut from the Modello masking material. I decided that the best way to achieve this look of mottled color variations was with acid staining and acid etching.

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Acid staining involves spraying on diluted acid stains (essentially muriatic acid, mineral salts and water) and letting it work it’s magic as the acid etches and opens up the concrete surface to allow the mineral salts to react with the lime, creating the soft, mottled color. Once that was cleaned up and dry we applied the vinyl pattern and troweled gelled acid through the open areas of the pattern.

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The gelled acid pulls the color back out from the concrete in the exposed and treated areas-again in a way that is random with subtle variations.

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Acid is not the most pleasant material to work with and you must take precautions and get lots of ventilation going, but it’s a standard finish for decorative concrete and MAN it’s gorgeous!! Special thanks to Melissa and Richard for their help with this project. We actually were able to get through this in a few hours. This type of pattern would typically be used on a vertical wall surface, but the stripe effect on the floor really looks quite nice and makes the room seem a little bigger as well!

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Speaking of concrete! Please check out this post from my Artofliving blog about our weekend wine country trip with the fabulous Bob Harris and Bob and Lee Ann’s harley ride across the country to raise money for Breast Cancer Research.

February 3rd, 2008

Stair Master

Our wood surfaces adornment assault continues! I showed you some of the finished landings in an earlier post. Now I’m happy to report that the connecting staircases are finished as well and they are GAWDeous!

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My ever-abler new studio assistant, Melissa, did all the actual staining work on the stairs so is now an official “stair master”. You can imagine by looking at all that pattern on all those stairs that this was quite a bit of work!

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There are 24 different border patterns used. I was able to set up the colorways first in Adobe Illustrator to try and get some nice balance and contrast over the length of each set of stairs.

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The stair treads themselves are alternately stained a dark brown and a warm black and they look great from above as well but it’s the view looking up that is extra special. On a technical note, we have been using Bona’s Traffic for the topcoat and used this on the cork floor as well. It’s a bit tricky and pricey but lays down a lovely soft satin finish that has already proven it’s worth as a very durable topcoat for a commercial setting.

December 6th, 2007

Laid to Rest

It’s done! I had nightmares that something would go horribly wrong and my million dollar cork floor would get ruined somehow. Well, it didn’t REALLY cost a million dollars, but it definitely wasn’t cheap and we had another big chunk invested in labor and materials, AND there have been quite a few BIG things going awry lately, BUT I think we are safe. Knock wood.

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Once we got the whole assembly line thing down we were cranking out 35 tiles (on a good day). Richard and Michelle from our staff are pulling out the last pieces of the pattern to ready them for the final stenciled layer.

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Here the trusty installers are pressing the last tiles into place. Good thing THEY were good as we used all 120 tiles that we made. Phew!

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If you’ve never walked on a cork floor, let me tell you it’s heaven. Especially when all your other floors are concrete. It feels like you just put brand new gel inserts in your shoes! I’m so in love, I’ve ordered some more for my home office floor where I think I will do a very large “stained-in-place” meandering cherry blossom branch. Then we will see how it holds up to my greyhound’s toenails.

November 15th, 2007

Marquetry Madness

OK, I’ll admit it. I am totally and irretrievably obsessed with repetitive patterns: How to translate them onto different surfaces, how to apply them with different mediums, how to make them work, and how to make all of this profitable for my customers and, yes, me! I WOULD like to retire someday, preferably to a villa/vineyard in central Italy. SO, I started messing around with this simple and brilliantly efficient Modello Marquetry Masking System for applying pattern to wood and other porous surfaces (see the cork below) and think it’s so slick that I’ve filed a patent on the process.

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It’s all still a bit “in the works”, like everything else in my life, but I wanted to share these first samples with you. I was in a rush to find wood and get it cut, so settled on Oak plywood (bleech!). The grain of the wood fights with some of the patterns but you get the idea.

Modello Marquetry Masking System Samples 1

I’ve had a bunch of unfinished maple flooring laid down at the new building (see what I did at my house here), and some large unfinished birch doors, so will have some really nice surfaces to decorate. Now, to pick out which patterns……

November 14th, 2007

Uncorked

Two down, 118 more to go.

Modello Cork Tiles

One of the projects in our new building that I am most excited about is doing this stained cork floor, because 1) I think it is truly unique, and 2) I think it is going to look really, really cool, and 3) Cork flooring is hot! We had to wait 4 mos. for the unfinished cork tiles to arrive on a slow boat from China (seriously) so now have to get them done pronto so they can be installed before the furniture arrives.

Modello Cork Tile Detail

I saw this pattern in the HUGE, absolutely gorgeous Taschen book, The World of Ornament and was wierdly drawn to it. It’s not my usual design crush and it feels fun to try something completely different. We are using water-based stains with Modellos and stencils to complete the pattern on each tile. Once it’s installed, I’ll add some umber colorant to the sealer to knock it back a bit.  Just a bit. Fun, huh? I’m just not sure I can bear to let people walk on it!

September 1st, 2007

Operation Decoration

When you are planning an assault or military campaign it’s a good thing to have a really good icon and/or catchy slogan to get people to rally ’round your cause. You know, “Uncle Sam Wants You!” and all that jazz. Well, I am in the final planning stages of a full-blown assault on my new building and it’s freshly primed and painted walls, ceilings, concrete floors, cork tiles, hollow core doors and sheet vinyl. AND I have the icon. Lauren designed this great logo for us and I added the camo because that’s the kind of mindset I’m quickly developing.

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We like it so much we are going to have it silkscreened on Alternative Apparel’s Ivory colored “Destroyed” tee. The shirt is all worn out around the collar and hem. Just the kind of tee shirt we USED to turn into a dustrag. Now we LOVE it. Cracks me up. So, we are going to put the logo on the front and a slogan on the back. I am thinking of “Waging war on white walls and boring surfaces”. Does that grab anyone?!?!

I am putting together an extensive series of low-cost, study/work classes that will allow participants to learn the techniques, create samples and then immediately apply them to real-world situations-that just happen to be available in my new and needy building. I am also bringing in some special guest instructors. We will be emailing the workshop schedule to our student database next week, so be on the look out for incoming information if you have taken classes here. If you have studied with me at other locations and wish to consider enlisting, please email me. I promise you a really cool tee shirt….

December 9th, 2006

Art under foot

I love designing patterns and finished for floors. Ceilings too! Floors and ceiling are generally an area where you can make a much bigger design statement than walls, with GRAND designs and more combinations of pattern and color. Walls get curtains and photos and pictures and tall furniture, etc. placed in front of them and sometimes need to take a back seat.

Floors and ceilings are definitely more physically challenging to paint and decorate, which is why I said I love DESIGNING for them! LOL. Our current office/studio has a lot of decorative floor treatments that I will miss looking at when we move. I think my favorite though is the Kimono floor that was created a couple of years ago. (I’ve had this Kimono obsession going for awhile, I guess)

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The application was a combination of acid and Modello Dye Stains on a Colormaker overlayment. I first graphed out the area and then penciled in the swirls and shapes. This was then translated into a vector file in Adobe Illustrator so the colors could be played with and blocked in and the various patterns moved in and out and around to see what looked good. I love computers-most days! To do the saw cuts that separate the different sections, I had the Illustrator line drawing paper plotted on large sheets of paper that were taped together on the floor and then cut through with a 4″ diamond blade affixed to a grinder. It was a little intimidating at first, but not really that hard. Then the different areas were treated to different color and pattern applications. I think it’s a great look for a commercial space! There are more photos of floors and floor designs in the Floor Show gallery. I should have a lot of fun designing the floor spaces for the new building: Elaborate carpets, large graphics, etc. I am even thinking about the possibilities of painted cork!