… went the full ophthalmologist.

• 

• 

• 

The stencils are aluminium, 2″ and 4″ size. I’d been doing some work with text and realised that, back in the day, I would have used Letraset rather than my own handwriting, which was only decent in primary school and now is barely legible.

The first is Payne’s grey on varnished cartridge; the second adds a scrape of silver acrylic across the surface to roughen the appearance (because I’m in new-kit playschool); and the third is what happens if you slide some Hooker’s green over the grey then add some off-key hot pink from Stuart Semple. With the right glasses, you could probably see that in 3D!

Key learning? First, those stencils are sharp so handle them carefully. Second, they’re light and quite bendy which makes them reasonably easy to use – I applied these upright, not flat, although flat might have been better. No dribbles though, and I like dribbles! Third, they’re washable – scrubable if you get to them a bit late – and I doubt the paper-based versions would survive that.

Tip – you’ll notice I didn’t use the whole alphabet. Primarily that’s because there wasn’t room, but oh my goodness am I glad of that because washing 20-odd pieces of sharp edged metal with more sharp edges inside the cut-out was quite a challenge. They’re from Stencil Marking.