'David Hockney has put trees on the map — and the design world has them on everything else' wrote Barbara Chandler for the London Evening Standard.
Barbara suggested that readers could Hockney-fy their walls using spray paint and our largest bare trees stencil. I reckoned that this was a brilliant idea and worthy of experiment, I told my husband that I'd be late home (again) as I wanted to stencil a wall of vivid coloured trees in our shop. This reusable, plastic stencil stands at 97 inches (almost 2.5 metres) high, so it is not a five minute job to paint a wall full of them. He suggested that I spend an evening at home instead and he would mock up some walls of trees on the Mac.
A stencil is a tool to apply pattern and colour. The scale of the pattern, the colours and method of application are the choice of the user. Bare Trees is a negative stencil, this means that the surface becomes the tree colour and one applies another colour to surround the tree shapes.
This is our version of how to Hockney-fy a wall with our tree stencil. Start by randomly spraying or painting the wall in a similar fashion to this.
Much of the background will be covered when the trees stencil is applied.
The stencil is positioned over the painted background, I use a light misting of repositioning adhesive to hold stencils like this in place and it is important to have the stencil flush to the wall when spraying paint through it. Tonal variety can be added to the stencilling as well as the background. Pictures 1-3 show this effect. Careful use of a foam paint roller is an alternative way to stencil large areas of a single colour. The following illustration demonstrates the effect of stencilling with flat, peach coloured paint over the painted background.
Voila, a homage to Hockney's Bigger Trees using paint, stencil and courage.
Prefer something more subtle? How about beige paint stencilled over a white surface? Or use a silver paint that can reflect the colours surrounding it.
A word about the duo that inspired the experiment. I have featured Barbara Chandler on previous posts, She is a very interesting lady, a best selling photographer, a well-respected writer, a champion of contemporary design, a well known Londonphile and her Love London work is enjoying much praise at the moment. See it on murals, fabrics, furniture, cards, books and more.
David Hockney is so much the man of the moment what could I add? His website tells much about current and previous work. See Hockney's Bigger Picture at The Royal Academy London until April 2012. My husband is a fan of his and says that Hockney has inspired him to take a closer look the landscapes around him and see them not as ordinary but as something to be celebrated.
Bare Trees border and wall stencils are available in various sizes from The Stencil Library.
Helen.
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