The latest from the Stencil Maker

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…
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…
Interpretative Portraits with Stencils
Professional photographers capture the most important and interesting features of a subject. They use framing and lighting and perspective and lens selection to do all that. Some of those creative aspects of a good photograph also come out in a stencil. In particular, when shadows fall just right, those shadows are gold in the stencil…
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…
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…
Stenciling Three Layers is Better Than Five Layers
I love three-tone (light, mid-tone, dark) stencil portraits. They capture light and shadow really well, if the original photograph is good. Most people seem to opt for more layers because the preview looks better. But it’s advisable to tune your upload until the three-layer stencil captures the detail you want, and go with that. This…
How to Stencil a QR Code
QR codes are an excellent way to add a modern touch to any project. QR codes are capable of holding a variety of information such as web links, plain text, and even business cards. Why would I want to paint a QR code? Some of the reasons you might want to stencil a QR code…
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. In fact, you can use Artificial Intelligence to generate a repeating tile that works great as a wall stencil. You’ve also seen hexagons used…
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…
Making a Wall of Faces
Make a wall of faces for your organization. It’s not as hard as it looks! Start with a blank wall. It’s probably easiest if the surface is white or nearly white. For each person, You will only paint the mid-tone and dark layers for each face. For each face, isolate the person’s face and features…