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Step 3Draw it Out
Once you have your templates, now you need to draw your stencil. This is the step most people skip, going straight from Photoshop to cutting, but I find it to be the most important. A really good stencil is created by thinking out how it will look (see a theme here?), not by mimicking the output of a Photoshop filter. Photoshop doesn't think about how much detail you can reproduce, or how you need to avoid islands, and so forth. Being able to negotiate between what the computer sees and how you want your stencil to actually look is what separates the men and women from the boys and girls in stencil-world. This is where you add your artistic touch to the piece. I do this using Adobe Illustrator, but you could just as easily do it by printing out your results from the previous step and tracing them on a sheet of tracing paper. As you draw your stencil, you want to consider a few things:
1) There's only so much detail you can cut. Even if you're handy with the steel you can't knock out 0.5 mm thick lines, and if you could the paint wouldn't go through them anyhow.
2) Unless you're willing to cut multiple plates of the same color, you can't have islands in your stencil, or areas of "blocking" material that are not connected to the "frame" or border of the stencil. For example, you can't stencil an "O", the best you can do is something like "( )," or a "C" on one plate and an ")" on another, lined up to form a perfect "O".
3) The jaggedness or smoothness of the lines is what will give your stencil image texture, so think about it as you plan your cuts. For example, if you are cutting a stencil of a face, smooth curves will suggest even, smooth skin. Jagged lines will suggest a rough, uneven surface. You can really breathe life into your stencils this way.
4) if you remove too much material when you cut, your stencil will be brittle and flimsy, and more prone to lifting at the edges in the breeze of the spraypaint. This isn't necessarily bad, but be aware of it. If need be you can re-enfroce it with wire (see the Step 5).
Once you're done, print it out. This will be your cutting guide. If you're creating a multi-color stencil, you may want to include some sort of alignment guide so you can line up the plates. Really smart artists will sometimes hide an alignment guide in the piece for themselves. For example, maybe one strand of hair is exactly the same in each color plate, allowing you to line it up.
1) There's only so much detail you can cut. Even if you're handy with the steel you can't knock out 0.5 mm thick lines, and if you could the paint wouldn't go through them anyhow.
2) Unless you're willing to cut multiple plates of the same color, you can't have islands in your stencil, or areas of "blocking" material that are not connected to the "frame" or border of the stencil. For example, you can't stencil an "O", the best you can do is something like "( )," or a "C" on one plate and an ")" on another, lined up to form a perfect "O".
3) The jaggedness or smoothness of the lines is what will give your stencil image texture, so think about it as you plan your cuts. For example, if you are cutting a stencil of a face, smooth curves will suggest even, smooth skin. Jagged lines will suggest a rough, uneven surface. You can really breathe life into your stencils this way.
4) if you remove too much material when you cut, your stencil will be brittle and flimsy, and more prone to lifting at the edges in the breeze of the spraypaint. This isn't necessarily bad, but be aware of it. If need be you can re-enfroce it with wire (see the Step 5).
Once you're done, print it out. This will be your cutting guide. If you're creating a multi-color stencil, you may want to include some sort of alignment guide so you can line up the plates. Really smart artists will sometimes hide an alignment guide in the piece for themselves. For example, maybe one strand of hair is exactly the same in each color plate, allowing you to line it up.
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