The latest from the Stencil Maker

The Painting Curve is Not a Curve
Larry’s Painting Curve My first painting teacher, Larry Robinson, described The Painting Curve to us this way: you start with a blank canvas, you rapidly develop an underpainting that you like, you add some basic composition and then you reach a plateau. The plateau comes because you don’t want to lose any of the potential…
Make a Text Stencil Using Any Font
Stenciling images is cool, but often you want to add some text to give context to the thing you’re stenciling. Alphabet letter stencils and stencil fonts It used to be, the way to handle this was to take out your big set of letter stencils, like the parking lot painters, and just do one letter…
Halftone Color Stencils that are Not CMYK
I’ve chosen the name for this post so that hopefully, if you’re here, you know about halftones and are looking for something beyond the standard CMYK halftone separation. Four-color separations We’ll start with the four-color separations which include CMYK, and work our way down the list to separation models with fewer and fewer colors. CMYK:Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black…
Make and use a cake stencil
Stenciling onto a cake can make a somewhat ordinary dessert extraordinary. Powdered sugar on a chocolate cake The highest contrast combination that’s easily made with ingredients you probably already have around the house is powdered white sugar on a chocolate cake. I’ve found that increasing the moisture of the chocolate cake helps it to look…
Stencil Your Car with Spray Chalk
Spray paint a car? That sounds like it could get you into a lot of trouble. But use a stencil with spray chalk, and you’ll find you can create neat, bright markings that last for a couple of months and that gradually weather away. Spray chalk is used on non-porous surfaces for temporary marking. As…
Stencil a Gift Box
In our house we have a ton of leftover boxes from personal electronics purchases. Let’s face it, companies like Apple and Samsung have really upped their game when it comes to packaging. The boxes are so nice you don’t want to throw them away. So here’s an idea to upcycle them. What you’ll need You’ll…
CMYK Halftone Stencil Tutorial
To follow this tutorial, you’ll need What is a CMYK halftone? CMYK halftone is a printing technique used to reproduce continuous tone images using four colors: Cyan (blue-green), Magenta (hot pink), Yellow, and Black. Photographs or complex color graphics are broken down into halftone dots of varying sizes and densities, which are then printed using…
Mid-tone sidewalk chalk stencils
Art students learn the art of ‘dark-light-dark-light’ (chiaroscuro) by drawing with dark and light chalk on mid-tone (typically brown or gray) paper. The mid-tone is the default, and the shadows are dark and the highlights are white. This technique works as well on concrete or asphalt as it does on brown paper. If we create…
How to Bridge a Stencil
I first started making stencils because I had a brand new laser cutter, and I wanted an excuse to watch the laser cut up a bunch of card stock. Without knowing too much about stencils, I used the ‘trace’ function of Adobe Illustrator to separate an image into light and dark. When I fed the…
Make stencils with DALL-E
Let’s just jump in and say that the slickest-looking artwork is going to come from MidJourney, about which we’ve written pretty extensively: But MidJourney doesn’t do everything (yet!). So we’ll get right to the two things that DALL-E has on MidJourney that are super-useful: outpainting and inpainting. Outpainting in DALL-E Outpainting is when you want…