Studio Time

This is a composite of several different stencils that I’ve airbrushed with watercolor and white gouache. It’s 25×19 inches on Crescent Illustration Board. This is a print version. The original is not quite as contrasty and a bit more blue.

…A short history of the stencil:

Way back in the late ’70s, before I started college, I did paintings of simple abstract “landscapes”… worlds of floating checkerboards, stripes, shadows and so on. After a time, I started populating these paintings with simple organic forms. Most of them resembled “squiggly, little blob things” for lack of a better term.

Over time, they got a little more complex and I started “collecting” them in sketchbooks. I managed to build up a considerable catalog by the end of the ’80s. When I started doing airbrush work it made sense to cut them into acetate and use them as stencils for various and sundry paintings.

When I switched my focus to digital stuff back in the early ’90s. I spent many happy hours in Aldus Photostyler. Photostyler had a function that would let you save selections to a file. So… many of my stencils became digital files and I used them joyfully with Photostyler’s digital airbrush and it was all great fun. Of course, after I discovered a copy of Minix on a BBS, I parted ways with those files and learned that backups actually are useful.

(Minix is lovely by the way. It’s probably a good idea to actually know what you’re doing before you try running it. 🙂 )