Since I have been intrigued by stencils all week, I decided to make my own stencil, and show how it’s done.
A good stencil is done when there is no wind and when it is warm out. Cold weather freezes spray paint, and wind blows the spray paint away from whatever canvas you are working on. I got lucky with the sunny 50 degree weather today, but I was cursed when it came to the wind.
The first thing you have to worry about when it comes to stencils is supplies. The important things are spray paint, your stencil of choice, and your canvas. For this project I opted to buy a cheap, store brand spray paint from K-Mart that works on interior and exterior projects. Most street artists would not have to worry about interior paint, but because I was not working on brick, cement or wood, I needed something that would stick differently. For my canvas I chose a giant shoe box that I had in my room that was going to waste.
For my project I chose to do most of my work with store bought letter stencils. I have not made a stencil in years, and the last time I worked with an X-Acto knife I ended up with a pretty terrible gash in my leg, so I was a little hesitant to try my hand at anything detailed right away. I did, however draw a partial stencil, just for an example. The trickiest part to stencils, in my opinion, is perfecting the hollow or empty parts of letters and images. For example, when I drew my “P” stencil, I left a tail so that the center of the “P” wasn’t closed up when I cut it. Because it was so windy, I knew any center stencil I would have placed down would have blown away.
Hand-drawn stencils are similar to negative photographs. When drawing a stencil, the artist draws out all of the negative parts of their image, and cuts out the part that they want to paint. With multi-colored stencils, and artist has to layer their colors, and layer their drawings so that they all fit into each other. It’s almost like an artist’s puzzle piece.
It’s also important, when drawing a stencil, to make sure your lines are crisp and completely perfect. Any jumps or rough edges will show up on your project, and if you make a mistake when cutting out the stencil it is very difficult to fix.
My shoebox “canvas” needed to be prepped for the stencil. Street artists don’t have to worry about this step of their process, because the spray paint clings easily to brick, cement, concrete, wood, basically any outdoor surface. When working with a glossy surface, or a textured surface like a paint canvas, it important to prep your surface so that the stencil’s paint has something to cling to. If this step is skipped on indoor spray painting, an artist’s final work can bead up, or bleed, and look sloppy.
Once the white paint that I sprayed on the shoebox dried completely, it was time for me to start the stencils. My first mistake with this project was choosing the wrong medium to carve my stencil out of. A good stencil should be carved into a stiff surface, like cardboard or even wood, or it should have some sort of adhesive backing. Because I used flimsy cardstock, my stencil continued to raise off of the canvas. This results in spray paint blowing underneath the stencil and onto the white canvas. It didn’t help that the wind was blowing everything all over the place anyway.
When I raised my handmade stencil, it was a little sloppy, but not as bad as I would have thought. I did a bad job raising the stencil, however, and my nail scratched the top of the “P” leaving a bit white scratch. It’s nearly impossible for someone like me, who has had very little experience with stencils, to go back and fix a mistake like that, so I left it alone. I had also done a poor job of cutting a straight line along the outside of the letter, and I didn’t do the best of job at aiming the paint away from the stencil’s edges. But for an amateur in a very windy front yard, I think I did a pretty good job.
Once my first stencil dried I was set with the task of placing down my final letters. It is important to make sure the letters are placed evenly, with equal space in between each letter. One thing that is easy to miss is all the space between each letter, and if this is ignored your pictures or words can be spaced too far apart and not look cohesive. Like I said before, it is good for stencils to have an adhesive backing, so I used standard duct tape to stick my letters down onto the canvas. This also helped make sure everything was balanced before I sprayed them. After I layed down the letters, I also covered all of the white space with scraps of paper, so that the paint wouldn’t get into any blank spaces I didn’t want it to touch.
When everything was laid down and covered, I began spraying my black paint. When I spray paint, I make sure that I keep my hand about a foot away from the canvas. If not, the paint will come out too close to the canvas and make giant paint spots, which will run and look too dark. When spraying, I go evenly back and forth, with one consistent spray the whole time. If the paint is sprayed in little spots and not consistently the outcome will appear inconsistent. Once the whole thing is sprayed, I like to leave stencil on until the paint is dried. That way, if the paint is too heavy in certain places there are less of a chance that it will bleed out of the lines.
When peeling the stencil off of the dried canvas, it is important that you be careful of getting the adhesive stuck on the canvas, or ripping the canvas in anyway. If your tape or adhesive is too sticky it can pull off the base paint, like my white paint in my project. After all your hard work, that is the last thing you want to happen.
I peeled off all of the letters and…
Tada! I think it turned out pretty great, if I do say so myself. Considering the fact that the wind was making it almost impossible to get the paint to touch anything, and that I haven’t made a stencil in almost five years, I’m pretty proud.
I really love stencil art. The technique and planning it takes is really the most genius part about it, and I have to give some serious credit to any artist that can master such a difficult task.
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Painted Philly 