
Three-color Traditional Stencil plus Halftone for Portraits that Pop: Kylian Mbappé
Stencil portraits are great. From portrait stencil cards to the classic three-tone portrait to making a wall of faces, there’s no more compelling image than the face of somebody you love. That’s why we keep finding more ways to make those portraits POP. Here’s the latest. Halftone Portraits From our earlier post, you probably know…

Halftone Color Stencils that are Not CMYK
I’ve chosen the name for this post so that hopefully, if you’re here, you know about halftones and are looking for something beyond the standard CMYK halftone separation. Four-color separations We’ll start with the four-color separations which include CMYK, and work our way down the list to separation models with fewer and fewer colors. CMYK:Cyan-Magenta-Yellow-Black…

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…

How Much Detail Should I Include in my Stencils?
You’ve got the portrait about right, but you can’t really see that dimple in the shadow of his face. How much detail does a stencil need to include? In the end it comes down to taste. But there are some aesthetic and some practical considerations. I like the graphic look of a stencil. I like…

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…

What subjects make good stencils?
What subjects make good stencils, and which ones don’t? Let’s put a pin in a list of bad / good and then talk through some examples. Bad subjects clouds landscapes artistically blurred photos black dogs rainbows and other gradients (unless the rainbows are cartoon rainbows, like this one) overexposed or underexposed shots loose group shots…







