VIDEO: Design your own peasant painting with stencils
Peasant painting is a form of folk art that is still very popular today in apartments designed in a country house style. Furniture, jugs and vases, but also many everyday objects, can be designed with stencils in the style of peasant painting.
Painting with stencils - preparation
- Regardless of whether you want to paint a cupboard, a tray or a wooden box, even as an inexperienced painter you can conjure up very beautiful motifs as peasant paintings on your objects. Stencils help you to apply the motifs.
- First of all, however, you are spoiled for choice. Typical motifs in peasant painting are flowers such as roses, tulips, daisies, poppies or cornflowers. Stylized leaf shapes, fruits and ornaments also flow into the motifs. You can find free coloring pages that are suitable on the Internet. You can use these, adapt them for your project or even draw your own motifs.
- With stencils you create the possibility to quickly transfer repetitive motifs, for example flower or leaf shapes, onto your object. Before making the template, measure how big your motif needs to be. Change the size if necessary. A computer can help.
- If you have to change the size by hand, proceed as follows: Place a piece of tracing paper over the motif and draw a network of grid lines over it. The motif now always intersects with these lines at certain points. If the new motif is to be 30 percent smaller, draw a second network of lines where the distance between them is exactly 30 percent smaller. Draw the intersections of your motif on the reduced grid. When you connect these you get the scaled down motif. The denser the lines of your mesh, the more intersections you will have. It's similar to painting by numbers.
Making stencils - this is how it works
Many people like to work with stencils. For some pictures it is better if ...
Peasant painting - make the coloring page
- Use special paper, cardboard or thin plastic film for stencils. The latter is certainly the most stable and can be used over and over again.
- You can simply have your motif copied onto the film. That’s the easiest.
- Or you can transfer it with tracing paper. To do this, draw the lines of the motif on the tracing paper with a soft pencil. Then turn it over, place it on the future template (paper or foil) and then trace the same lines with a harder pencil. The motif is then expressed on the surface.
- Now either cut out the open areas, then paint them out as you would with stenciling (for example, as when attaching a frieze to the wall) or you can cut out the motif yourself. It can be a flower, a leaf or a heart. Place this stencil on the object to be painted and trace the outlines in this way. You can create whole bouquets of flowers from different shapes.
- A cutting board or a simple other board and a sharp cutter or craft knife are ideal for cutting out. Scissors are sufficient for simple motifs.
Carry out the peasant painting with stencils
- With stencils in which you have cut out the motif on the inside, i.e. when stenciling, you work in one color. It just works. You put on the template, align it exactly, fix it with adhesive tape if necessary and paint the shape. This is suitable for borders on the wall or on the floor, for decorative strips or as a painted decorative board for a shed or house.
- Typical peasant painting is multicolored. When you have drawn your motif with the help of the stencil, the shapes are colored individually, i.e. leaves, flowers or tendrils, as you wish.
- Feel free to use different shades of green for leaves, draw in the leaf veins and connect everything with tendrils if it fits.
- Stamens also belong in the flowers, outline some shapes with a different color or paint the flowers in one color but different light and dark. So be creative and patient. Peasant painting as a folk art is very diverse and decorative.
- The best thing to do is look at some nice items. Either in a museum, at the antique dealer, in books or on the Internet.
