Let’s Stencil…Tupac

Let’s stencil…Tupac!

In this series we take a stencil and try it out. The first time through, we just kinda paint it the way it comes out of the box. Then we get some ideas, and we modify the stencil sometimes. Or we leave out a layer. Or we paint it on a different colored surface. Anyhow, from what we learn we typically make something better or more interesting the second time around.

Get the Tupac stencil.

First Pass

tupac shakur stencils out of the box from bay stencil

This is a five-layer stencil. We’re painting on a white surface, so painting the white layer isn’t going to do much.

tupac shakur stencil first pass with lots of bridge lines
what the first pass looked like

Learning

There were three things that we saw that we wanted to change:

  • The marks where the bridges left white lines–we want to fix that
    • the darker the paint, the more noticeable the lines
  • The detail around the eyes is lost because of poor contrast
  • Something is really popping out on his cheek–looks like somebody left a coin there or something

We like the way the secondary ‘shadow’ appears on the left side of his head (looking from our point of view), and want to keep that. Gives it more dimensionality. Texture of paint on the cap makes it pop. The black layer could stand alone as a single black-on-white stencil.

Second Pass

So we removed a bunch of bridges that weren’t *really* necessary. And then we chose to start with lighter spray for the lightest layer, to improve the contrast handling and give us more range from layer to layer.

tupac stencil rendered after extra bridges removed

Stand-alone stencil from black layer

This often turns out this way: the black layer has enough detail and is high-contrast enough that you can use it all by itself.

black layer of tupac stencil can be used by itself