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Category: Technical Stenciling

  • sample spray painting cap skinny

    Spray Paint Caps and Can Pressure for Stencils

    So much of what’s known and the standard applications for spray paint materials is obscured by jargon. Here’s a breakdown on caps and can pressures for the rest of us. If you’re in a hurry and just want to know what kind of can and cap to buy to use with your stencil, it’s easy: […]

  • stencil of tomatoes in greyscale

    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 […]

  • Abutting versus Overlapping Stencils: the Zebra or the Ladybug?

    When you create an abutting stencil, every part of the surface is painted once and only once. In an overlapping stencil, you can paint over previous colors. The same image can be stencilized in an abutting or an overlapping way. But some images work better one way than the other. Here’s an example of stencilizing […]

  • school bus stenciled on wall above mylar stencils

    Why You Leave Out One Layer When Painting a Multi-Layer Stencil

    When you make a multi-layer stencil, you typically want to get more colors or more tones than you get in a single-layer stencil. But if you use all the stencils and cover all of a rectangular surface area with paint, you end up with something that looks more like a painted postcard than a work […]

  • lizard stencil on wall

    Customizing Your Stencil

    Is your stencil working for you, or is it just frustrating you? We ship non-overlapping stencils by default, but I’m here to tell you that if you want an overlapping stencil (where the surface is painted twice or more, on subsequent passes) it’s often just a few cuts away. We’ll look at a specific example […]

  • school bus stenciled on tile wall with yellow background

    How To Work With the Surface Color

    You may remember that we often want to leave out one of the layers of a stencil in order to let the surface show through and to keep our stencil work from looking like a giant post card. In this post we ask the question, ‘How do you work with the surface you have?’ We’ll […]

  • Stencil Tessellations Cover a Surface

    A tessellation is just an arrangement of shapes that cover an entire surface in a repeating pattern without any gaps. The most common example of a tessellation is just repeating squares. You’ve also seen hexagons used to tile a surface, too, I’ll bet. But you don’t have to stop with simple polygons like squares and […]

  • What Are Registration Marks, And How Do You Use Them With Stencils?

    When we talk about registration, we’re not talking about signing up for class. We’re talking about making sure that one stencil layer lines up on top of another stencil layer so that you don’t get muddy stencils. When do I need to use registration marks? There are many stencils that you don’t need to register […]

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