Project 12: Splatter painting

My friend Emra had a difficult year last year and decided to move to Spain to be closer to her mom. This means I obviously don’t get to see her very often so a mutual friend and I decided we would send her a care package. It has all sorts of random stuff (chocolates that have cows on them, tshirts with random things on them, cotton buds, etc) and naturally we needed to have a card or two included.

Emra is really arty and I thought my cards might be a bit too cutesy for her so I decided to shake things up a bit and get out the paints. I had this idea to do part of her nickname in one colour and then do the rest of the background in another and let the paint be the interesting feature of the card rather than a complex layout.

This was my result:

I first cut out a stencil of the letters in cardboard, keeping the original cardboard intact so I had the cut-outs and a stencil to work with.

Next I filled in the letters by putting the stencil over the card and then splattering navy and green acrylic paint over the card. Cleverly I thought to put it in an old wash bucket before I did it.

Still covered me in paint though.

Then I let it dry for about 4 hours before removing the stencil, blocking out the painted letters with the original cardboard cut-outs and repeated the process to splatter paint the background light blue.

It was dead easy and I’m pleased with the result. Took ages to dry but the actual painting took less than 5 minutes each time. Something different from my usual cards!