I have a thing for Circles

I used the Cricut Expression, and contact paper to cut out concentric circles that I used as a stencil. No messing around with expensive vinyl, contact paper is cheap and comes in a big roll!

Let me start at the beginning, for which I don’t have a photo.
I had some scraps of door from making my desk, and one scrap was 30 x 50”. Perfect for a nice big wall canvas.

I painted it with a thick white layer of wall paint, lay a piece of ironed white sheet over it, and painted on top of the sheet.(using a roller) This gave me a large fabric canvas that was sturdy as all get out. I did the same to the sides with paint, and on the back I used spray adhesive to connect the fabric to the door because the wall I’m going to hang it on is newly painted, and two painted surfaces don’t like to touch, even if they are both dry.

With the canvas ready, I moved onto my stencils.

To make the circles, I set the blade housing at 3, the pressure at med, speed to low, and the result was the blade cut through the sticky side of the contact paper, but not the backing. Now I know that PC makes vinyl, but because I didn’t use it, I can’t say this would be the right settings for their vinyl.

I first pressed shift, and the circle 4th up from the bottom on the left side of the overlay. (accent #11) This gave me a single circle. Then I changed my dial size by ½ inch, moved it back to the starting point, and moved the blade housing into the circle three nudges. (this would be from the right edge of the matt, not the inserted edge. Then I cut out the funky circles button third from left on the bottom row of the overlay. (Accent #43)

I cut it out in multiple sizes.

When it came to laying it on my canvas, it wasn’t the stickiest stuff, but because I was using a stencil brush, and was going to be pressing downward as opposed to painting across, I figured it was good enough. Also, a thin circle, once removed from the backing, and pliable as vinyl is, laying the circles perfect took some getting used to. I was an expert after the first color ;-) I also used some masking tape on occasion when a circles edge was a bit on the thin side.

I used every other circle from each set of cuts, so I got twice as many circles to stencil, and more variety in size. I did use the outer square edge cut too. (I cut my contact paper into squares before I put it on the cutting matt.

I started painting in the middle of the canvas with one color. I worked my way left, mixing my original color into darker and darker shades of brown. When I began working my way right, I started mixing green into my original color.

I wanted to wait till the whole thing was finished before I removed any of the stencils. This is what it looked like with all the stencils still attached. A bit of a mess.

I touched up just a few places with a sharp edge 1/4" brush when I was done.

Next I'm going to spray the whole thing with Glimmer Mist. My cool friend Shellie Hubbartt is sending me a bunch of her colors to use on this, who knows what it will look like after those arrive.

I am also, hanging an eclectic assortment of picture frames to the left and right of the painting that line up with it's top and bottom edges. The effect will be a decorative "stripe" that spans a white wall. I'm also thinking of shoving some color into the grooves on that white wall to make it look a bit oldy-worldy. (This is in the room that I just retextured)

So I guess I've posted a work in progress again :D

TFL!