Masking has always been a somewhat intimidating technique to me. I think that’s for a couple of reasons; firstly, good masking paper is hard to come by over here and I wasn’t willing to pay the large sums of money needed to get it because I didn’t want to end up just wasting it. Which brings me nicely onto my second reason; I hadn’t ever tried it with proper masking paper, so when I have tried it in the past with cheap stuff it hasn’t been the best experience which is off putting. I don’t mind admitting to you the areas I feel less comfortable with; this is a safe space!!

This class made me finally bite the bullet and have a real go at some different masking styles.

I grabbed my mega floral stencil and taped it down over a panel of watercolour paper, then used a pencil to trace the different spaces that make up the image.

I removed the stencil and applied Nuvo Masking Fluid into each of the shapes. I figured out that the easiest way to do this is by adopting the same technique you’d use when icing a biscuit; you trace the outer edge of the shape you wish to mask with the fluid, once this barrier is created you flood the inner parts until they meet up with the perimeter you created.

This can take a while to do, but I quite enjoyed it to be honest!! I sat in my craft space, fan on (because it is scorching here in the UK right now ?) and listened to Michelle Obama’s podcast!

Once it was completely covered I set it aside to dry; this took quite a while! I think it was partly due to the size of the areas covered and partly down to the humidity here but I ended up leaving it a good 24 hours. I aren’t saying it did take that long to dry, I just gave it extra time.

I decided to do some ink smooshing over it, with some quite muted colours because I was going for a sort of grungy type style.
I chose Victorian Velvet, ??????????? distress inks and worked in a number of layers; allowing each layer to dry thoroughly before adding more colour. These inks are transparent, so they layer over the top of eachother in such a beautiful and organic way. I did struggle to get ths ink into the smallest of the gaps, so I used a damp paintbrush to push the colour that was beaded up on top of the masking onto the paper. I made sure not to mess too much with this though, because I was really going for an organic effect.
I added some Confetti White Perfect Pearls into a little bit of ?????? and splattered that onto the panel and I absolutely love how that turned out!!

This needs to dry completely before you remove the masking, so I left it overnight.

The easiest way to remove the masking is by using an adhesive eraser, this makes light work of pulling up the masking. The paper did tear a little bit in places but they were all very superficial which didn’t bother me at all and felt like they worked perfectly for the style I wanted.

I used a 0.1 black fineliner to draw around each part that had been masked to define the shape a little and added a wonky hand drawn border around the whole panel.

For my sentiment I used the new Mega Label Love set and stamped out ‘Happy Birthday’ in Versafine Onyx Black which is my favourite ink for both detail and large area stamping.

I added my sentiment and some black sequins, then I popped the whole thing up with foam tape onto an A2 card base.