Stencil Tips and Tricks

How can I get fewer visible bridges in my stencil?
Sometimes it can be tough to get a clean-looking stencil with no visible bridges. Stencils with more layers typically have fewer visible bridges If you’re having trouble with awkward bridges, it might help to dial up the number of layers in your stencil. The more colors (layers) you use, the more likely that you’re going…
Small and Extra-small Stencils
Suppose you want to stencil Taylor Swift’s face onto twenty pairs of sneakers, and sell them on Etsy. Great idea! [Chuck Taylor Swift. Chuck Taylor. Taylor Swift. Get it?] Now let’s look at how that idea meets reality. Spoiler alert: Dave is going to talk you into accepting some limitations of small-scale stencil work. Read…
How to Pre-Process Your Stencil Images with PhotoPea
What do you use to pre-process your stencil images? Anything? If you’re not using anything today, I would recommend using something like PhotoPea. PhotoPea is an image editor that runs in your browser. Why would I want to process an image before uploading to Bay Stencil? Usually Bay Stencil gives you some pretty good options…
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…
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…
What to do when your Stencil is Grainy, Speckled, or has too much Detail
Color separation is the process of reducing a full-color image to just a few colors. Having just a few colors is part of what makes a stencil look unique. Your original image usually has millions of colors in it, and when you reduce a rainbow of colors in a detailed image down to just four…
When To Use a Halftone CMYK Stencil versus a Traditional Stencil
Halftone stencils are fun to make and paint, and they are surprisingly versatile for reproducing images that traditional stencils often can’t reproduce. Elsewhere we show how to make and use a CMYK halftone stencil. This article is all about knowing when to use a halftone stencil versus a traditional stencil. As you’ll see, sometimes you…
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…

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