On Wonderful Watercolor Maps

I’m so excited about how my watercolor maps are turning out!

My maps of “Western Europe” and “Central/Southern Europe”

The vinyl-cut stencils don’t stick terribly well to the canvas and are hard to transfer, so I tried I tried laying down the positive space of my vinyl-cut stencil and spraying with a finishing spray. Then I peeled the vinyl cuts off and watercolored in the positive space. Turns out the spray I used did not work as an effective barrier, so that attempt failed!

I decided to hope for the best using the stencil as negative space. My first attempt was on the western part of Europe. I used transfer tape to transfer the stencil to the canvas: this turned out to be very difficult, as the transfer tape clung to the vinyl much more than the vinyl clung to the canvas. After much finagling and frustration, I managed to lay the stencil down. Next was a matter of painting inside the lines and waiting to see how it dried.

As you can see in the top right, I gave up on removing all of the transfer tape!

Final map of “western Europe” — not too shabby!

Next, I moved on to central/southern Europe. I decided to slowly peel the vinyl directly onto the canvas this time, as the transfer tape seemed to cause more trouble than it was worth.

As you can see, slowly peeling directly onto the canvas was also a difficult and frustrating process!

After another bout of finagling and frustration, I managed to get the stencil to lay flat and arrange all of the small lines dividing the countries. Below is a photo of the final painting of central/southern Europe. I think I like it even more than the first!

All in all, a pretty productive week. I have two maps painted with one or two more to go (United States and potentially the Middle East), and now I’ll be adding all of my pins and photos to the AR app. Until next time!