While on my social media adventures a couple weeks back, I saw a video that inspired me. It was a really fun painting style that I knew I could recreate with the supplies I had. In the coming days I was going to be seeing some family, so we opted to do this together that weekend!

This turned out to be so much fun. I brought as many different supplies as I thought we could potentially need and we ran the experiment.

Basically you’re creating a stencil with masking tape. You’ll want to be sure that the tape is sticky enough to prevent bleeding, but not so sticky that it will damage the painting surface. Once you have your stencil placed on your surface, you start filling the spaces with all kinds of colours!

I chose to do a couple flowers with a dragonfly, while my sister opted for birds. I used mainly acrylic paint for the base, then topped it off with some fabric pains for the accent touches. My sister also worked in acrylic, but used my watercolour sprays to really pull all of her colours together. The final effect was wicked!

We first thought that we should let the paint dry before pulling off the stencil. Luckily both of us corrected ourselves before the paint was fully dry. For those who don’t use acrylic paints, they dry as a plastic, and they can’t be revived like a watercolour can. They are plastic forever haha. So pulling the stencils off when it was fully dry would have pulled all of the paint off of the main surface. Unfortunately, this did happen to a few of my flower petals, but it worked out as a nice design element, so we’re ok. This is just a good reminder for next time.

I am so happy with how these came out, especially considering this was a full on experiment the whole time. It’s fun to try a few new techniques and to get your hands dirty. I am at my most me when my hands are covered in paint. I can’t wait to give it a try again.