How To: Stencils!

All right, I decided to make this a separate thread from the Reversible Purse, for obvious reasons.
It's super easy to do, except when it comes to the whole cutting out thing, but I'll get to that in the sequence of steps.
Let's get started!

1.Get a picture from practically anywhere, preferably one that has a white background.



2.[ If you have a background in the picture, you have to white it out, and sometimes it can be a real pain because the stencil you want blends in with the background, so you don't know where something begins and the other ends. Good picture selection makes things a lot easier in the beginning.
To white it out, you either use the eraser or paint over with white. You also do this to get rid of yucky pixels if it's a poor quality picture.
For examples, I picked 4 photos. 3 with backgrounds, 1 without. 1 of poorer quality, 1 great example, 1 good example, and 1 harder one.



3.After you are done with whiting your background,you can do one of two ways to add the stencil look of your picture.

Option one: Go to the toolbar in photoshop and select "Filter" > "Artistic" > "Poster Edges"
For the settings, put the Edge Thickness at 10, Edge Intensity at 10, and Posterization at 0.
If you do that, your stencils will look like the ones below.



Option two: Go to the toolbar in photoshop and select "Filter" > "Artistic" > "Cutout"
It will look like the ones below.



For the settings, you just sort of have to mess with it. There is not an overall good setting. Usually making the number of levels higher helps with bringing out more detail, but still has a simple design to it. However as you raise the number of levels, the harder it is to do the next step. Also, with the levels, both stencils only have ONE color. So they gray is essentially black (except for some, like the picture of Chi, the more difficult one). Keep that in mind.
These settings are a lot more simplistic, and easier for beginners to stencil. However, some don't like the simplicity, but this type of stencil tends to look better than the first option would on certain items.

Note: Using a certain setting for one picture doesn't always work on another. Test out the thickness, intenstity, posterization, etc. for each one.
Especially with the cutout setting!

4. Now it's time for coloring in and adding bridges to the islands.
First off, an island is when white is completely surrounded by black. so when you cut it out, the white will sort of get lost or float in the middle of the stencil. You don't want that. You want everything connected.
You can have islands when you get used to stenciling, it's just easier when you first try it out. it involves double sided tape, wearing gloves, holding it down, worrying about getting the spray on fast enough with your hand in the way, etc. etc. Why not just go the easy way out the first time?
So, As you see in the pictures above, there are a few islands in each of the pictures.
As for coloring in, you just get rid of unnecessary white spots that you could make bridges for, but it's not essential.

I'll give you the finished product of what I did so you can compare with the pictures above.




Poster stencils:








Cutout stencils:






I ended up not doing the cutout stencil for Chi. I apologize, there was too much gray to work with, and going too simple with the settings cut too much out of the detail.
Sometimes you just have to find another picture.

If you have any questions, post them here ^_^

Enjoy~

i think that the spike cut out would look best on a bag either that or the chobit poster, depending on what type of bag

very cool. ^^ I think I will steal this idea for some of my posters, lol.