Exploration in the New Year

First of all …. a very happy New Year and all the best to you this coming year! I am very excited to welcome 2018 and see what it has in store for us all. 2017 was a bit rough for so many of us, personally and globally, within our community and without. Every year has its challenges, of course, but I like to greet the new year with optimism and enthusiasm because it does represent so many new possibilities.

New possibilities may be about looking forward but it can be helpful to look back in order to create new and exciting futures. I’ve dug up a few interesting techniques from the past in order to, hopefully, spark some new ideas and encourage you to find new ways to use older techniques.

Let me tie into some of last week’s subjects. If you didn’t see the post about the silkscreen stencils on Friday, do check that company out. That would provide you with new designs, pre-made or custom, to try a new approach with. Then try a little something different, using multiple colors and controlled placement. I believe that is what Kleio Tsaliki was doing with these gorgeous sheets she created back in 2015.  I am thinking she used stencils and pearlescent paints and, in the top two, taped off sections as she applied colors. Or maybe she is using a stencil sponge to control where the color goes, which would work for the more random placement seen in the bottom sheet.

It doesn’t matter that we don’t know how she did this as the ideas we are guessing at are quite worthy of a bit of exploration regardless. I have found some really cool, unintended effects when I have just been guessing at how other people have done the work. It just pushed me to think of new ways to approach familiar techniques.

A quick click on this link to her Flickr pages will show you the variety of sheets she created. And if you are not into guessing how she did it, she also has a tutorial on this stencil technique available in her Etsy shop.