Beautiful Bokeh Tutorial

If you’re into photography you’ve probably heard of bokeh. If you haven’t heard of it before, bokeh has roots in the Japanese word, ‘boke’ meaning ‘blur’. You can spot the effect easily in photographs as they’ll feature a soft, blurred out-of-focus background. The technique brings depth and dimension, with crafters trying to translate the effect into their projects with great success; you’ll often see soft shapes which are characteristic of the effect such as designs featuring overlapping circles, or layers of shapes including the front layer containing lots of white circles.

You don’t need to stick to any particular colour scheme or shape to achieve this on-trend look to your projects, although I personally think the best look is from using circles as this is akin to the original look.

There are various ways you can achieve the look yourself from the easy to more advanced techniques. If you’re a beginner and you don’t fancy getting messy in any way, why not use different coloured vellum or just overlap lots of shaped white vellum pieces? Or you can go one step further and incorporate the look in the a quick and easy way by using a bokeh-style patterned paper!

If you fancy playing with inks and paints to achieve the bokeh effect, start by stamping some basic colours and shapes, overlapping some of them, to create a gentle look. If you don’t have circle stamps, punch or die-cut circles from cardstock or acetate to create stencils and apply ink or paint through them. If you fancy taking it up a level, why not paint a multicoloured background with a medium such as watercolours, ink or paint and then build up layers of white or darker colours and using lighter concentrations of colours or white in the background with a thicker more opaque layer in the foreground.

You’ll find that your bokeh-inspired projects will echo a soft and even ethereal look. So why not give it a whirl and try your hand at creating your own beautiful bokeh projects today?