Urban Chic Graffiti

The weather here in the UK has been gloriously sunny and hot this past week. Personally I love the hotter weather and constant sunshine although I do understand that some people suffer in the heat. But like all good things the wonderful weather is about to change and the rain is starting to roll in.

Last Saturday I was in Bournemouth, a beachside town in the south of England, attending a workshop with Mark Gould. It was a very hot day but we were tucked in a lovely cool room at the Atelier shop and Mark was teaching us different techniques to create a graffiti based wall hanging.

I won't tell you the techniques that Mark taught us, you will have to take his workshop to learn the secrets, but we used a 10"x 10" (25cm x 25cm) wooden base, an image transfer technique and lots of DecoArt products.

As soon as I saw this image I knew I wanted to use it. There is something about Audrey Hepburn that has always appealed to me. This type of black and white image is called 'a threshold' image and is available from Andy Skinner's website under his Products tab along with some other iconic images.

As you can clearly see we used stencils to create a textured background. I chose the wall stencil as the project is based on wall art. We also got to use some products that I'd not used before so it was great to have a play with new mediums. 

We also used small stencils to mimic graffiti and, lastly, some word stencils. I chose images I thought went with the glamorous, iconic picture. The stencils are from DecoArt and That's Crafty.

I can highly recommend Mark's workshops. His style is what he describes as " Industrial Grunge meets Shabby Chic" and he has several different classes to chose from. You can find Mark on Facebook where he advertises his workshops.