Getting Up

This may sound funny, but my first real interest in street art came from a video game.  Marc Eckō's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure was released in 2006 for the PS2 and put you in the shoes of a young kid in a future dystopian society protesting a fascist government and gaining notoriety among other street artists.

This game was largely overlooked by the gaming community, probably because the play control was pretty clunky and it was released for PS2 right around the time the PS3 came out.  All that aside, the urban exploring sub-culture aspect and a killer soundtrack made this game a hit in my book.  Not to mention cameo appearances from real life graffiti legends.

Design

This is the most important part of a stencil. It's the creative step where your art is made. It's my favorite part of the process.
First you need a subject. A word, phrase, object, animal, person, message. This is where it's unique to you and probably the reason you're making a stencil and not buying one.

If you don't have photoshop, you're going to want some free photo editing software.  Paint.NET is what I'll be using.  GIMP works great as well. If you're a mac user, I'm still looking for a good free utility. GIMP can run on mac, but I've been looking for something native to Mac OS. So far, the one I'm using is less than stellar.

Once you have your photo software running, open up your picture with it and resize it so it is at least 8 inches wide.  We're okay with pixellated images, we're going to be editing and smoothing it out anyway.  For this example, we're doing a one layer stencil.

Original greyscale image

First turn your photo into black and white.  If the subject in your picture has a dark background, it's a good idea to crop some of that out at this stage.  You can leave some of it around your subject or not. 

Cropping out dark background

The next step is to adjust the contrast and brightness settings.  The contrast needs to go to 100.  We want a straight up black and white image here.  The brightness needs to be adjusted to your taste.  Play around with it a bit to find the level of detail you want.  You may want to adjust different areas of the  If you are just doing text, this isn't an issue.

100% Contrast and variable brightness

Once you have the stencil looking generally how you want it, we have to look at creating bridges and islands.  Look at all of the areas where you have white completely surrounded by black.  These are the islands.  You'll either need to create bridges to them, or black them out.  Creating obvious bridges looks bad in my opinion.  If you can, try to blend them into the design.  The design also should not be touching the edges.  You should also take some time here to clean it up and sharpen up any details if you so desire.

Cleaned up background

Sharpened up mouth and removed any islands

Once you have your complete stencil looking how you want it, turn it into an outline and print it out.

Outline for printing

Supplies

You're going to want to get down to an art supply shop or a craft store and get these items to get started making stencils.

• Self healing cutting mat - Mine is 11x16 and that's a decent size I think. You don't want one too small.

• Xacto knives - You want a standard #2 for most work and a #4 for fine detail and small cuts

• Acetate or stencil transparencies

• Depending on the quality and thickness of you're acetate, you're going to want cardboard too. Something like office file folders work fine and those are what I'll be using.

• Spray adhesive

• Scotch tape

• You need a computer and a printer as well. I'm assuming you've got internet access or you wouldn't be here. You might need those dang ol' interwebs depending on what you're doing and what your set up is, but more on that later.

• Paint
• As far as paint goes, you've got options depending on your project. If you're looking for spray paint, Montana Gold is supposed to be the best stuff. I'll be using Rustoleum. Krylon or any other paint should be fine. You want to get flat paint and not gloss.  You're might want these additional items if you're using spray paint: Rubber gloves, paint mask, glasses.

• If you're stenciling the walls inside your house, you might want to look at getting some flat wall paint and a small roller and tray.

The Beginning

So here you are and you want to make your own custom stencils. I'm just starting out myself, so if you're a beginner too hopefully this blog will provide a nice introduction into making stencils. Whatever your motivation is from street art to fine art on canvas or maybe you're someone who wants to graffiti their bedroom walls with poetry or what not, the end result of this blog should get you making your own stencils and making your own art. It's not a fast and easy process, but this is going to be the Q&D from one amateur to another. 

So first things first. Let's start with supplies.