[Zeke]

I have done some and it's not hard but complicated to do a treatise here. I'd suggest getting more books and see if there is a class in your local community teaching toll painting and like craft.

The cliff: essentially you need a short, stiff stencil brush and paint that will behave. Over thinning, of course, would make it difficult to work with. The stencils themselves can be hand cut using available stencil paper, a waxed product. A plotter with a knife would be real handy.

It's a tedious job but well worth it in satisfaction. Certainly practice on some drywall scraps.

In addition, have you heard of the various ultra thin fabrics that can be applied to plaster walls to bridge spider cracks? In older times they used something called sanitas cloth which was apparently a thin oil cloth applied over wet primer and primed again to capture the material within the paint layer. You can get a fiberglass product today that will work well with water borne-primers.