Christmas Cactus stencil print

I made a stencilled card for my Dad's birthday...

First I took a photo of a Christmas Cactus plant I have, then I printed the photo and traced the shapes of the leaves and flowers. I coloured in selected areas of the traced design:

Then I traced the areas that I would stencil in different colours, as separate layers, and cut them out of card with a craft knife:

Then I stencilled the design onto a blank card using a brush and acrylic paints:

I stencilled the 'soil' by cutting out that area and drawing in there with a black coloured pencil, as opposed to paint, to add some texture to the picture.

A Christmassy-New Year-Birthday print!

You can make a stencilled picture with your own design by following those steps.

Camellia card

 

I made this stencilled Camellia print as a card for Mother's Day recently.  This was my process...

 

I photographed then sketched a Camellia plant which was blooming in the garden of our house.

 

I separated my sketch into 4 layers, by choosing the parts I would print in different colours.  Then I traced each layer onto some stencil card and cut out the shapes with a craft knife.

I stencilled each layer onto card, using a sponge and some fabric inks (produced a bit of a blobby effect, rather than using drier paint, e.g. acrylic, and a brush, but I had some nice colours already mixed in the fabric inks, and didn't mind the slightly blurry outcome).

Here are the printed cards (not yet folded) drying on a clothes horse...

...and here's the card I sent my Mum:

linocut greeting card

I taught a class last week on making greeting cards using linocut stamps.  I prepared an example by cutting out a traditional design from the copyright-free pattern book, 'Sarasa Woodblock Patterns', and carved it out of a small piece of lino then printed it by rolling ink on the block and pressing hard on the back of the stamp.