Category: Technical Stenciling

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…
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. This article is all about knowing when to use a halftone stencil versus a traditional stencil. As you’ll see, sometimes you have a choice between the two and just need to weigh the…
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…
Use Midjourney to Make a Repeating Wall or Floor Stencil
You’ve seen high-impact rooms with repeating patterns stenciled on the wall or floor. We generated some repeating interior wall stencils together some time ago. But what about making your own custom pattern? I made a dozen custom patterns in an hour or so with MidJourney version 5. (Remember, we used the AI to generate stencil-ready…
How to Paint an Oversize Stencil Using Registration Marks
In a recent post, we painted a three-panel giraffe to warm you up to multi-panel stencils. Now we’re going to paint a four-panel stencil that uses registration marks on all the corners. It’s easy to follow the video example, but the key steps are shown here. Steps to paint a 3-layer, 4-panel stencil Assuming that…
How To Make Oversize Stencils on your Craft or Laser Cutter
You downloaded the nifty SVG stencils for Halloween or your favorite band. And you can cut them at up to 12″ x 24″ on your Cricut if you have the extra-long mat (and extra-long stencil material). Take this giraffe for example. It’s a good looking-stencil, but with the giraffe’s head smaller than my hand, it’s…