 Hi everybody, it's Sandy Allknock and I am here with nine stencil techniques for you today. And the reason is we are celebrating the ninth Memorial Day blog hop at Operation Right Home. It's our ninth and last. You have until August 1st to get your cards in before the end of Operation Right Home. So we are celebrating and helping to get the word out by having a blog hop. I'm going to show you this stencil. This will work with a lot of different stencils, but I'm just going to use the stars because I'm making any hero cards to send in the final boxes to our service members. So I'm going to make a whole bunch of these. Technique number one is going to be using one of my favorite things, which is my Copic airbrush. And all I have to do is put the Nina card stock behind the stencil. I have it all taped in place so it'll stay. And then I put my Copic marker into the air gun, which is attached to a compressor and then press the button that presses air across the nib of the marker and through the holes in the stencil so that I can then have this really beautiful soft background. And on my blog, there's going to be links to all the supplies needed for each one of these. So if there's anything you're like, oh my gosh, try that, click through at the end and you will be able to get to see my blog post. So technique number two is this one using the leftover Copic marker that's on the stencil. Since I have to clean it anyway with some colorless blender, why not do it over another piece of paper and see what happens. So I'm going to push the color from the stencil, from the plastic of the stencil into each of the star holes. So it's going to make kind of a little funky star shapes, but they look kind of distressed and cool. And depending on what image you use, I've done one with a poppy that looked really gorgeous using this technique. But it also works fine with these stars. And you see, I've got a real soft background here. And then for cleanup on this, I just dump some colorless blender on, smoosh it and turn it over, smoosh it again until it's all clean. Technique number three is going to be using some distress inks. I'll use distress inks for a lot of these. When I have my blender tool, I'm just going to push the ink through the holes onto the paper. The paper I'm using for this one is Hero Arts letterpress paper. And I really like the way that it takes distress inks. It just does a really good job of it. These stars are super sharp and crisp, which just gives the card a really sharp look to it. And the colors mix as they meet across the middle and they make sort of a purplish-blueish color, which is kind of cool. And I love each one of these reveals. When you pull off a stencil, you get to see the magic that was created beneath it using that design. Next, I'm going to take the dirty stencil before I wash it off. And again, I want to use it and do something with that ink that's on there. So I decided to try this with my texture paste and I put some over top of it while there's still distress ink. Distress ink is water-soluble and there's, I guess, moisture in this paste. So it'll pull some of that color out into the texture paste and end up with this really super soft pinkish-blueish type of stars. And after you get done with any texture paste, make sure you wash both your palette knife and your stencil right away. Soak them if you're not going to have a chance to wash them just because you will never get that off of there again. It'll dry hard as a rock. So again, the reveal, pulling that off of the piece of paper. And this is on watercolor cardstock just so it'll hold up really well. And here we have another one on watercolor paper and this one, I'm going to do the same thing again. And put the color through the stencil onto, this is the smooth side of the Tim Holtz Ranger watercolor cardstock. And we do half the blue and half the red as per the thing I've been doing throughout this video. And get that color all in there. And then I thought, let me see what happens if I just saturate it with water. So I took my mini-mister filled with water and spritzed it. So you can spritz a little, you can spritz a lot. And it just starts to break down the ink in the distressed inks and the shapes will start to get mushy. And you can see on the right that it ends up being this really soft kind of, it's almost a background that looks like you're looking through frosted glass, which is really cool. So depending on how long you leave that water on there, you can get different effects. And here I did the same inking technique, but I'm taking a brush and some water and just painting over top of the stars. And then if you let the water sit on there, it'll break down that ink again and loosen it up so that you can take a paper towel or a rag or a Kleenex or something and wipe a little bit of that off. And you start getting these multicolored, textured, like watercolor-y looking stars. And as they dry, they dry with like cool watercolor edges and stuff, very, very cool technique. That'd be fun with a lot of different stencils. Next up is my favorite. I think this is the one that came out the best, but I didn't know that until the very end. So we're still getting it. It's number seven. I took my texture paste and put it on the card and I'm trying to do a nice thin layer. I want the layer to be about as thin as the stencil itself. So just kind of wipe it across like frosting and you're really trying to wipe it off of the stencil, but onto the cardstock itself. And I'm using watercolor cardstock here because I'm going to beat the daylights out of it. So the Tim Holt stuff stands up to a lot of different things. And that's what I'm using here because it's really heavy and it just puts up with a lot of abuse. So here I have two of the pure color spritzers from Dewey Plus Nine. And these are not patriotic colors, as you can see. And I wasn't really sure whether I wanted to proceed with this one or not, but since I'd already gotten them out because I wanted to play with them, they've been on my desk forever since I bought them. And oh my gosh, look at the fun color here. Oh, so cool. And I just kept, you know, kind of adding a little bit more color. So I make sure I filled in all of the areas on it. You can see the card off to the right after it dried came out very, very awesome. So this next one, number eight, I use my embossing Dabber Dabber from Ranger. And if you know what VersaMark is, this is kind of like, I guess, VersaMark in a Dabber. So you can put, you know, put this through anything and put your embossing powder on it. So I'm using clear embossing powder and I made my dabbing a little bit on the rough side because I wanted to have it be a little more of a distressed look. So just spooning my, my little clear embossing powder on top, going to heat set the whole thing and get it all ready to roll because afterward I'm going to put color on it. Now you can add the color in whatever way you want. You can use distress inks. You can use watercolor over it. You can airbrush over it. Lots of different things. Don't use your Copic markers over top of it. That's all because the embossing powder may ruin the nibs and you don't want to find out the hard way. But I decided I liked those colors enough on the last one that I would use them on this one as well. So just sprayed them and you can sort of see they make a little bluish. When, when the two colors mixed together, it's a little more bluish than tealish at times. So it still came out very patriotic. But this time I decided to see what happens if you dab off the color. So I just wiped it all off and wiped down the front of it a little bit more. And all of that embossing did a really cool resist. Very fun. Now this last card I had, this was after one of my sample sprayings that I was testing, I had this mess on my desk. So I decided I was going to make a background out of it. So don't let all of this beautiful juicy yummy ink go to waste. And I just dipped my card in it. And this is the Ranger card stock again. This is good, heavy stuff. And then I took my stencil after that background had all dried, took my stencil and I just added my distress ink right over the top. And so these stars almost look like they're sort of behind this layer or some of them are popping up and coming through. You could do this with different colors, all kinds of fun things you could do to create a cool background using stencils. So I hope something in here appealed to you and maybe you have some of the supplies at home. So you could try some of these out. Here's a few other videos if you're interested in seeing a few more things. Otherwise, I hope you have fun on the blog hop today. Go hop along and see what everybody else is sharing and spread the word about finishing up Operation Right Home by August 1st. And I'll see you guys next time. Take care. Bye-bye.