Can I say I am addicted to the Copic Airbrush System!! You got it I airbrushed my napkins for my Thanksgiving Table setting. Now this started as a very simple search for a fall napkin that I could design a paper napkin ring for to match my Thanksgiving Place cards. Every year I wish I had time to set a beautiful Thanksgiving Table. Somehow this Holiday gets smooched between Halloween and Christmas and the madness of Black Friday. So this year I decided to design my table in September. After searching everywhere for the perfect Thanksgiving napkin for my table, I settled for a pale yellow paper napkin hoping to design an over the top paper napkin ring. Pondering this plain napkin on the drive home the light bulbs went off and I decided to try my hand at airbrushing the napkin with my Copic Sketch Markers and my Dreamweaver Stencils.
Anyone who has taken a Dreamweaver Stencil class from me knows that I never teach traditional stenciling...I prefer embossing paste, gold leafing, krylon webbing, spray inks and the cool stuff!! Well let me just say that airbrushing my stencils is now COOL STUFF!! I airbrushed all four corners of my cloth napkin ( yep, you guessed it - a trip back to town for cloth napkins once I saw how gorgeous the paper napkins looked). To achieve the airbrushing I cut out a triangle from a piece of copy paper to mask the second image on the stencil. Next I taped off the paper, making sure the removable tape did not cover any of the stencil. Don't be stingy with your tape!! You need to tape down all the edges or you will over spray onto your napkin. First I airbrushed the stencil with an orange Copic Sketch Marker, skipping over the acorns, then I airbrushed some red, making sure that I did not cover all the orange. Then I used brown to airbrush the acorns. I repeated this all four sides of the napkin. ( you may need to re-tape your paper mask before you reach your fourth corner as the copic markers may make your tape less sticky as you work your way around the napkin). You won't believe how fast and easy you can airbrush your stencil. Allow your napkin to air dry and then heat set it with an iron. Place a towel between your iron and the napkin. To clean your stencil use rubbing alcohol. If you happen to airbrush your fingers - Windex works great for cleaning your hands.
Now in that search for the perfect table setting, I could only find white place cards with silver edging. But the place cards had a glossy coating which meant I could use my Copic Sketch Ink Refills to alter them and make them look like Polished Stone Paper. I like to use a wide applicator for creating polished stone paper. I used a yellow refill and simply dabbed the re-inker over the entire place card. I placed the re-inker ink directly on my applicator and dabbed it up and down all over the place card. I added extra ink to the silver edging, which now looks gold!! The Copic re-inkers take slightly longer to dry than traditional Alcohol ink. After my image dried I stamped and embossed in black Happy Thanksgiving. MSE has a new thanksgiving clear stamp set with the perfect size verse for the place cards. The pumpkins for the place card and the gift tag were made from a stack of pumpkin stamp from Northwoods Rubberstamp. Here is the gift bags for my Thanksgiving Guests:
When I first started coloring in the grapes for this image the purple Sketch marker I had was too dark, so I simply used my Copic Sketch Blending Pen to color over the purple and the blending pen picked up the excess ink and lightened my grapes. Then I used a paper paint palette to dab some of my purple sketch marker on and used my blending pen to pick up the ink from the palette. This method gave me a much softer shade of purple. You can us the lighter color of any marker to pick up the ink from a darker version of the same color to create a medium tone. (yes, your lighter colored markers can be used like a blending pen). I stamped this image twice, and cut the bottom pumpkin for the place card. I used the middle of the pumpkin image for the gift tag. I plan on stamping my guest names on the reverse side of the place card- closer to the Holiday.
