Airbrush Tutorial

As I mentioned in my last post, there is a Holiday Open House at Angela's on Saturday (tomorrow). What I failed to mention is that I will be doing a free Copic airbrush demo from 10:30am- 11:30am and again from 2-3pm. It is the same demo for both sessions, so hopefully people will be able to attend one of them. While preparing for the demo, I thought it was also an opportune time to post pictures of one of the techniques I will be showing. Posting a bunch of pictures for a tutorial really makes me appreciate people who do it on their blogs all the time. Yikes!

For today's tutorial, I used my airbrush with a brass stencil of a pear.

This is a close-up of the finished card. You would be able to get similar results with pigment inks and a makeup sponge if you didn't have an airbrush. However, the airbrush really allows you to have smooth transition of color.

I first placed the stencil onto white cardstock and held it down with stencil tape. Regular masking tape will also work if you "de-tack" it a bit on your skin or clothes before you lay it on your paper.

I sprayed the body of the pear with YR23 (Yellow Ochre). I hope you can tell from the picture that I tried to add more color to the right side and bottom of the pear. To add extra color with the airbrush, try holding the airbrush closer to the paper as well as pressing the trigger a bit harder.

Next I added YG03 (yellow green) to the leaf area as well as the body of the pear.

I added some more shading by applying YG67 (moss) to the bottom of the leaf and some E35 (Chamois) to the stem and bottom of the pear.

I could have left my pear "as-is," but I decided I wanted to stamp over the pear with some pear words. You will notice that my stamp was also in the shape of a pear, but it just happened to fit nicely over my stencil. You could use any sort of background image for this step...swirls, script, checks...whatever.

I inked my stamp with green ink and then stamped it over the stencil.

When I removed the tape, I was left with the image above.

I layered my pear onto some orange cardstock and thought it looked a bit like it was floating in air. I took it back off the cardstock and did some more airbrushing.

I airbrushed some W1 (Warm Grey 1) along the bottom of the card to ground my image. To finish the card, I simply layered it onto some green cardstock. I hope to see some of you tomorrow!