Magic, Marvelous, Easy Wall Stenciling

Stenciling is designed for you home decorators who want to Decorate Your Walls with Stenciling and create original schemes without taking the risks that accompany mural painting. With stencils, you can have some idea of how the design will look and can even experiment with different colorways before you actually put the paint brush to the wall.

There are so many variables that no two stenciled rooms look the same, even if the designs used are the same. The amount of stenciling and its layout, the way coordinating designs are combined, the colors in the design and background and even the decorator’s technique produce enough permutations to make each stenciling project unique.

Stencilling is Easy To Do

It is a craft that can be enjoyed at every level, from grand schemes designed and executed by skilled painters, to simple, inexpensive motifs that can be used to brighten up the bathroom or the kitchen on a wet Saturday afternoon. See our page “Stenciling-Getting Started”

Excellent stencil designs are available in cut or uncut form. Uncut stencils consist of the outline printed on oiled card ready for you to cut out with a good craft knife. These have the advantage of being cheaper than the ready cut sort, and they allow you to cut out sections at a time so you can layer the colors in a multi-colored motif, or even adapt the design to your needs by only including the sections that you like.

Stencilling On The Wall

When you think of Decorate Your Walls with Stenciling, the walls will be the main area of interest. The options open to you are wide and varied, limited only by your stenciling skill, courage and the look you want to achieve. Most people opt for stenciled borders. These come in many styles, from a discreet rope twist or repeating geometric motif, to flamboyant, harvest-festival style swags of corn, flowers and fruit.

Using A Border

The most popular ways of using a border are to run it around the walls at picture rail or ceiling level, just above the skirting boards and above, below or in place of a dado rail. More adventurous schemes use borders to form faux wall panels to frame a group of pictures, accentuate a small window, or to edge each wall individually with double corner borders.

Often, stencil designs form groups, and you can create interesting effects by placing two or three related borders next to each other to create a deep band of pattern. This technique looks effective when used to fill the space between a picture rail and the ceiling.

These groups of designs sometimes include corner pieces to turn the design without making an ugly break. Corner pieces are effectively used when a double border is taken round the top edge of the wall and the perimeter of the ceiling, the three corner pieces forming clusters in the room corners.

All-over stencil designs are more labor intensive than borders, but can give stunning results. Consisting, usually, of a small motif repeated at regular intervals over the wall and perhaps teamed with a stripe or trellis grid, they can form part of a coordinated scheme with the same motif appearing on fabrics or furniture.

Plan The Design

The advantage of stenciling over wallpaper is that you can plan the design to take architectural features into account.

The background you stencil over has an effect on the way the design looks, thus a sharp-edged motif stenciled on to a solid color looks quite different to a soft-focus sprayed stencil on a cloudy sponged wall. Broken paint finishes, such as rag rolling, color washing and sponging, are thought to be the effects most sympathetic to stenciling, so experiment with different backgrounds.

Reference: The Country Look—Decor & Crafts, Main picture by Janek Szymanowski