Friday, May 11, 2007

Self-portrait


I really had fun doing this. It's a technique in Randi Feuerhelm-Watts' Inspiration and Techniques deck. What's great about this stencil portrait is that I have no WRINKLES or AGE SPOTS !! Here's how I did it.

I scanned a photo of myself into my computer and then used Photoshop Elements to invert the image, which made my face a gray color. I printed the image to a 5" size and then traced around the eyes, mouth, eyeglasses, smile lines, nose and some wisps of my hair. The purpose of the inverting is to make it easier to do the tracing I guess because it flattens your face. You really don't have to do the scanning and inverting. Just enlarge a photo and print and then trace. All the inverting does is remove distractions.

Then I used a very sharp exacto knife to remove the lines I traced. Randi says to lay the stencil on plain paper and lightly sponge paint over the stencil. I tried that but what worked better was to use cardstock and a small stencil brush. I also used a repositionable adhesive to hold the stencil while I was doing the stenciling.

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