Full Color Stencil Art with Halftoning

Make full-color stencil art using a laser cutter. Ideal for large-scale printing on various surfaces.

Buy the stencils on Etsy.

Step 1 Materials

Tools

• Laser cutter: you could make one for $50, but I had one available.
• Image processing and plotting software: I used Adobe products and AutoCad, but there are certainly other options.
• Face mask for respiratory protection

Materials

• Tape: masking tape or painter's tape. The wider the better.
• Stencil material: I used chipboard; transparencies should work as well.
• Spraypaint: I used Krylon indoor/outdoor gloss spraypaint, about $3-4 per can at Walmart (I used Black, Raspberry, Global Blue, and Bright Idea).

Comments

[ydoroshenko]

E0))

[chubbthehippo]

I think it'd be smart to make it clear that 'face mask' doesn't mean those paper masks you'd see a doctor wearing that anyone can get for cheap, you need a full gasmask (ie 3m) to filter out the paint fumes, the face masks just stop dust.

Also, Krylon is terrible spray, it drips like hell. Go for Montana (either spanish or german, they're both good and cheap).

[kl0]

russian "zhopa" flower? )))

[kylemcdonald]

It's hard to say whether it was just some American who thought it would be funny, or if it was a Russian-speaker who loves the absurd...!

[machprod]

I think he/she was referring to the orange/pink flower in the picture above, the text is ">?0" which is "zhopa" when written in English :)

[HardCoreHacker]

My nickname last year at school was Andre. I'm skinny but REALLY tall

[orangeontoast]

they do do this for screenprinting. I had the same idea, just no access to a laser cutter and a little too lazy to do it by hand at the time.

[ramskip]

nice technique, this might also work well for screen printing. i'll have to try it out sometime and let you know. thanks, d.

[I_am_Canadian]

That guy looks like the giant from the movie princess bride...

[maxmaz2]

he is andre the giant played him great movie by the way

[I_am_Canadian]

Oh. I did not see that. Cool!

[violent]

<<<...)) 6>?0=)

[kylemcdonald]

Yeah, I guess if you put a flower behind it you can paint pretty much whatever you want :)

[kai.h]

In the printing industry, the order to print colours is dark to light. Printers use translucent ink, so that they show through each other and help the colours to visually mix. Black, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow. Depending on how dense you spray the paint, it may or may not show through the colours underneath. If you're planning to paint thicker layers that will be more opaque then your technique of doing the layer with the most colour first probably makes sense...

[camscam]

hmm people will overprint the black commonly. In offset lithography on a 2-color press we typically run the cyan and magenta then yellow and black. When the black is overprinted it brings more detail, when its printed first it looks muddy.

[nosemeat]

i agree with the black overprint. when we have process jobs at work (i'm a textile screenprinter), we print black last, as it makes for a more crisp image. cool instructable, btw.

[kai.h]

Very interesting - It completely makes sense as the black adds the depth and definition to the image, so place it down last... With spray paint that's more opaque, it will probably look a lot better this way.

[kylemcdonald]

I'm a novice with spraypaint, so I opted for an even and opaque approach over a translucent but uneven one. Perhaps those more skilled than I can follow your insight and spray darkest to lightest, using translucent layers :)

[erfonz]

He really has a posse now...

[fungus amungus]

I gotta admit, something like this was buried back on my to-do list as well. I think I was looking at some licthenstein piece and thinking about stencils.

[kylemcdonald]

In that case, I'll admit that I'm just going through my to-do list :) Thanks for the feature!

[lamedust]

This was totally one of the projects I had on my "todo with the laser cutter before it got taken away" list. Thanks for showing me it could be done, I actually got hung up because my vector files were of 2mm pixels and the 6 year old laptop was crashing while processing. How long did this take to cut? Also since I don't have a cutter anymore, can you test a raster cut, rather than vector onto Bristol board, a thin cardboard. I figure that might make etching these things faster... You da man, thanks for mentioning my 50$Laser cutter! ; D -bg

[kylemcdonald]

Nice :) I've never made any raster cuts -- I doubt I could drive the cutter much faster though. I found the fastest speed I could run at while still cutting all the way through, and it's was something like 30 minutes for yellow (the most dense color). The smallest holes were probably 1-2mm across. When I tested today with transparencies, I got it down it to about 10-15 minutes each. Did the idea just come to you, or can you point to an inspiration?

[lamedust]

Well, I play this 2 min game where I get together with someone and list as many uses as possible for a tool till we are exhausted. Once we have the lists we bounce them back and forth, it's like a game and it's pretty fun. I have about 50 laser cutter projects, one of them is my http://www.instructables.com/id/Thumbnail-portraits-Etch-an-epic-battle-between/ fingernail etching and another is to make those ball bearing mazes out of acrylic. So that halftone idea came from when I rasterbated a design to enlarge and i imagined the holes were big enough to do "fat-tone" stencils.I don't have the laser cutter anymore, do you to collab o some ideas?

-bg

[kylemcdonald]

Wow, that's a great game -- I'll have to play that with some friends some time. I've got a bunch of projects I'm working on right now that I'd like to concentrate on, but perhaps when there's a long weekend or a break during the semester I'll send you a message and we'll dream up something ridiculous to do with the laser cutter :)

[LinuxH4x0r]

Awesome! I wish I had a laser cutter!