STEP 13
Cut the frisket along the outside pattern lines of your design. You are freeing the remaining background frisket from the pattern work area.
Cut along the outer boundary line of your design; this is the outer rectangle lines of the pattern area. Remove the frisket from the background.
Place one nice sized puddle of black and two nice sized puddles of white on your palette. Use one puddle of white during the next step to mix with your black to create gray. Keep the second puddle for the pure white work.
STEP 14
With a #8 to #12 shader, begin at the top of the design background and begin by applying pure black to the top 1/3 of the design.
As you reach the center third of the background area begin adding small amounts of white to your black to create a dark gray color.
Work down the background, adding more and more white until the last 1/6th of the background is painted in pure white.
By working the brush strokes of each new mix over the brush strokes of the last mixed color you can lightly blend the background into a graduation from black to white.
STEP 15
Allow the background to dry well with no glossy sheen or damp areas on either the painted wood or the frisket film.
With the point of your bench knife or craft knife lift one outer corner of the frisket film. Carefully remove all of the frisket film.
Check your painting for any areas where the coloring may have bled under the frisket film. Bleeding can happen is the film was not well adhered to the wood or if the paint was over thinned with water.
Clean any bleeds using a craft knife, or palette knife to scrap away the excess color. You can lightly sand the area if necessary.
STEP 16
I outlined my pattern lines using a metallic gold gel pen. Gel pens work well on a smoothly sanded wood surface, on gourds, and over the craft paint layers of the design. Allow the pen lines to dry for about five minutes to firmly set the color.
Gel pens are a wonderful substitution of liner brush work when you want extremely fine lines or uniform thickness in your line work.
They come is a wide variety of colors, plus you can get metallic, neon, pastel, and muted tones all in one large set.