Category: Stencil Art

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…
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…
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…
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…
Featured Artist: Kevin Minium–Classic Ford Coupe Stencil on Canvas
Sometimes you have a great idea for a composition and just can’t wait to get started. Whether he’s working in mixed media to create football concept art (we gather he’s a Seahawks fan) or just tricking out the man cave, artist and maker Kevin Minium never waits to do anything. And in this case, what…
20 Midjourney Prompts to Generate Stencils
When MidJourney first launched, we immediately wanted to come up with a stencil-friendlier version of Frida Kahlo. Interesting, and we eventually got what we came for. Now we’re back with more practice, and more experience getting a desirable stencil result. Why not go directly for what you want? Why beat around the bush if MidJourney…
Render an Internet Meme with a Stencil
Memes, with a little text or context, get your point across very quickly. Did you know that they work as well as stencils as they do on the Internet? If you want to stencil with a meme, you’ve got something going for you: it’s a meme, so people recognize it. Apart from the context, you…
Use MidJourney to generate stencil-ready art
You’ve seen AI-generated art, whether you know it or not. Marketers have been using it to generate ‘composite’ faces for years. You, know, that guy who looks like Tom Cruise with a little bit of Matt Damon mixed in? The combination seemed just a little too real. Anyhow, those same tools are available to everybody…
Stencils Don’t Have Color…Only Paint Has Color
True or false: stencils have color. False! The paint has the color, not the stencil. I painted three stencils each of which was color separated in a different way on baystencil.com. I painted a tomato, a captain america and a telephone to show you how the color separation affects how you finally use the stencil…
Using Stencils In Your Original Art
A stencil from an ordinary image can be pure joy to paint. Reproducing the image on a surface is very satisfying. But is that all you can do with a stencil? Not at all. Artists of all kinds use stencils as a starting point and go far beyond the expression of the original stencil. The…