Design your own logo and make a painting stencil

Lasers and plotters can be expensive! For most of us we would love to have the use of one, it just really isn't an economical choice for the average home user. So how do I get a professional looking permanent stencil for marketing my logo that I can transfer to anything. Stenciling is a great art art tool and it can take any beginning artist and raise their painting level quickly with professional results. Pre-cut stencils can get expensive building your collection; and often they are the boring same old designs that everyone has. No more do you have to be restricted by the cookie cutter designs out there, with simple easy to use techniques you can design, cut, and paint your personality on anything.

"Custom Made Logo Airbrush Stencils"

Step 1 Materials and tools

What you'll learn:
Designing and creating a personal brand, creating a stencil, then transferring it to any medium using paint.

Materials and tools:

Pencils
Paper (Tracing being the easiest)
Tape
Scanner
Printer or photo copier
Stencil blanks (Hobby Lobby sells them at 10 sheets for just a few bucks)
Hobby knife (like Exacto)
Paint (spray paint, airbrush, etc)
A hard surface to cut stencils on

A little drawing talent is helpful but there are thousands of free designs out there that can be traced and modified to your create your one of a kind logo stencil.

Optional Tools:

Adobe Illustrator (or any of the free tools like http://inkscape.org/screenshots/index.php?lang=en , I'm not soliciting or advocating this software just something I Googled for the instructable)
Adobe Photoshop (or open source like http://www.gimp.org/)

Comments

[HMice]

Awesome! This is something similar:


Great 'ible and good luck making more designs!

[LifeWarrior]

Yeah, that would make a great stencil to tag stuff, I love the "Why so serious?" very cool!

[HMice]

I found the picture on the internet, so hopefully there are more!

[heathbar64]

You can buy at Michaels craft store a tool called a stencil cutter. it's basically a soldering iron or woodburning tool with a special tip that melts through the plastic stencil material. I haven't tried it, but I imagine it would make a nice smooth cut edge. I think they were about $10 or $15

[LifeWarrior]

I'll have to check that out, it could make the stencil cutting faster than with a blade. I've made a ton of stencils in the past and have always done it this way, but that's what I love best about this site you can always find ways to make the DIY skill faster and with more professional results by sharing experiences. I'm actually working on a tools I got from a hospital that exactly resembles an exacto knife that cauterizes surgical incisions, it has a heating element built in but it didn't come with the power source just the pen and the wire as my next step.

[nzlemming]

You could also use a service like Ponoko (www.ponoko.com) to laser cut stencils in a variety of materials. Reasonably inexpensive and very precise.

[LifeWarrior]

Very good idea, I think in in a more long term use of the logo I would probably use a service like this to reproduce the design several times. As a DIY'er I like to do most things by hand the first time, also so I can have it right now so I can see what it looks like IRL. There are a lot of i'bles stating the same "slice this up for this amount of money", My attempt was more with just a few bucks in your pocket you can have a reusable stencil right now rather than waiting for it to be shipped. I've been up against this time crunch in the past and these are great in a pinch.

[daresquid]

A caveat. If all you need is a single size logo or piece of artwork then a bitmap program like Photoshop or the GIMP or similar works fine.

But if you foresee you will need it in various sizes from poster to business card, then using a vector drawing program like Illustrator or Inkscape or a CAD program is a far better choice. You will be able to scale your final result without image degradation and save yourself future headaches.

[LifeWarrior]

Good point, Perhaps I should've made that a little clearer, that if someone is going to be re-using the logo for multiple sources then have something vector based is good for resizing as well.

My attempt was to address not only the logo portion of this i'ble, but also for those just looking to make the stencil that may not have access to certain software due to cost. However my intention was not to discuss or try to teach a software use such as illustrator or general graphics manipulation; it was more to the point of getting it into living form and keeping the i'ble down to a few pages. As you know teaching someone how to fully utilize Illustrator could take quite a few pages and my thought was perhaps that would be better left to another i'ble.