Creating Simple Papercraft Backgrounds 

Want to take your arts and crafts to the next level?

Hochanda are known for elevating your skills whilst providing you with quality entertainment! The ‘Home of Crafts, Hobbies and Arts’ broadcast fantastic demonstrations and crafting inspiration live on air 7am-10pm every day. Today they have brought us a wonderful set of tips from one of their ever-popular guests Lou Withers! Not only will these tips be fun to try out, they will also enrich your works of art, giving them the extra depth that you have been looking for.

A great background should make your foreground ‘pop’, it is all about subtlety. Backgrounds are a great way of making sure that your work flows and looks finished. You can make sure your colours match or coordinate with your main focal point and that it is a bespoke background for your work. Lou is here to demonstrate just one idea for how you can create an effective and simple background for a paper craft or mixed media project.

What You Need:

• Stencil
• Two or three paint colours
• Sponge
• Card
• Water

Instructions:

1. Choose your stencil, and using one colour, sponge through on three areas of your card.
2. Using your next colour, repeat this but now stencil next to and slightly overlapping the first stencilling.
3. Repeat this with any other colours you are using.
4. Mix two of your chosen colours together then stencil onto card.
5. Using the mixed colour sponge all the way around your card, turning as you work to make sure its concentrated round the edge.

This creates a bespoke, original background that can be adapted to suit what you have created. Check out the full video tutorial below to see Lou in action demonstrating this!

Rejuvenate Old Ideas and Techniques

Bringing back old ideas and techniques is often a winner. In crafting, painting, poetry, song writing, architecture or any other form of art, ideas you may have had before that didn’t work at the time can have new life injected into them when you look at things from a fresh perspective or combine them with new ideas!

Have you thought of keeping an art journal? Occasionally, Lou likes to go through her journals and ideas books, of which she tells us she has many. This allows her to utilise old techniques and bring back old favourites, those little gems of techniques that she once used in nearly all her work.

A brilliant example is when Lou just so happened to find this the other day when creating a sample for an upcoming Hochanda show. Stamping out a waterlily from Jenine’s Mindful Collection onto MDF and using colours that reminded her of the artist Monet’s work. Lou then added colour and shading, but it was missing something…. she happened to have looked through her ideas book and seen glossy accents, a liquid glaze that remains 3D. So, she added it to the waterlilies, it made them appear deeper and denser in colour. Lou thought she could also use it on the stamped water ring lines. To her delight, this was exactly what she wanted and exactly what the work needed! To develop this effect even more she then applied a wash of colour over the surface and wiped it off the glossy accents, it really accentuated the lines and gave the appearance of movement in water.

From now on, when Lou loses her mojo or gets stuck, she remembers to leaf through old ideas books and brings back an old and trusted favourite – she encourages everyone else to try it too!

We hope you found a lot of inspiration and new tricks to try at home! You can stock up on all your crafting supplies at www.hochanda.com

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