camels on the walls

[elena-marie.livejournal.com]

okay my lovely craftgrrls, i finally got me a digital camera.
this will be the first of many posts of all the crazy stuff i do.
okay, not crazy. anyways, on to the camel stencils!





one day in bellydance class i was yammering on about you cool girls and your nifty teeshirt stencils.
my teacher says "oooh i have this cool picture of a camel, could you use it to make a stencil to paint on the walls?"
i say "um, okay" because i can't really say no. even though i have no experience with even using stencils. elena the pushover. i hate it when people ask me to make things for them out of the blue in a format where i can't say no.
anyways, she emails me this picture.



and i think "aaagh what a complicated picture to make a frigging stencil. i was thinking a simple one that i can reduce to black and white outline type!" grr.
so i put off doing anything with it for like a MONTH. then after she asks me a few more times and i grumble about the probable need for multiple stencils because of different colors and so on and so forth, she buys me a package of quilting stencil plastic and i feel better. so i get out my trusty paintbrush program and start figuring out how on earth i'm gonna do this.

ta daa! yay for paintbrush!

i printed out this, put a piece of glass over it, taped the plastic down really well and chopped away with my exacto knife. it wasn't so bad after all.

unfortunately, i didn't have my camera at this point, so i'll just tell you how i did it.

i had the stencil with the above green parts cut out. i sprayed adhesive all over the back of it and stuck it up, and used a stencil brush to put yellow down. then while the stencil was still in place, i put some brown around the edges to give her some depth.
then i took off the stencil, took the brown, made skinny lines around everything and on the legs. that part was hard, i drew a few wrong legs before i was done.

i moved the stencil to the side, and then it FELL behind the mirror. UNRETRIVEABLY! luckily i had the printout and the glass with me at the painting site. cut out a new one. painted 2 more. lost it AGAIN!
after that i put a long line of tae along that top edge of mirror where the stencil fell in the GAP, never to return.

after getting all the browns and tans down - 7 times, my sister and i went through them, assembly line style, i did the outlines, and she got out all the pretty colors. she did the boombox and the tassels, i followed her to do the carpet and the eye. it took a long freaking time. here's the final lineup of them, enjoy!