Stencil Tips

Faces: catch the shadows
Faces make great stencils! If you want to take a picture of someone's face to make a stencil from, make sure the person's face is lit from the side so that shadows fall across the face and accentuate the best details of the face.
Get up close
The closer you crop the image, the more stylized the details become. It's common to want to include facets of the background in your stencil, but the closer you crop, the better your results are likely to be.
Don't get hung up on color
Once you have the stencil in your hands, you can reproduce it in any colors you like. Krylon sells paint in over a hundred colors, as does Montana Gold. You won't have any problem finding the right colors.
Choose a foreground subject
That landscape with the barn in the distance looks great as an ordinary photograph, but in order to make a great stencil you'll want an easily recognizable object in the *foreground* of your image.
Cars
Yep, that's right. Cars make great stencils. Get a variety of angles in good light, and you'll be pleasantly surprised at the results.
Pets
Good luck getting Simba to sit still for a perfect shot--but once you get it--make the most of it. If your pet's face is dark, make sure you get good light from the front, with a neutral, uncomplicated background. Pets make great stencils.
Buildings
Buildings and landmarks come out great. Shoot 'em in the middle of the day, so the shadows fall in the windows and doorways. Is there a special home or landmark in your past?
Surrender the flash
Capture the best image you can with available light. Using an ordinary flash will flatten your image and eliminate the sideways shadows that help your eye recognize the features of a prominent object (like your dad's nose).
Straight from the phone
Use your phone to capture an image that you like. You can browse straight to this site on your phone, and upload the image directly from there. Receive the email on your phone, and post the resulting image directly to Facebook without ever sitting down at your desktop or laptop.
Great for business
Upload your business logo and use it anywhere. A stencil is a great way to mark and brand irregular sized packages that go out to customers. They also work great for marking company property in a personalized way. Request custom sizes to meet all your marking needs.
Better than vinyl for signs
Vinyl signs are expensive, and the second one costs almost as much as the first! With a stencil you can design once and reproduce (and repair) your signs as often as you like. Spray paint comes in many more colors than vinyl, and with a stencil you can use more than one color per layer, if you like.
Your logo here
No matter how simple or intricate, your logo looks great as a stencil. Upload your full-size logo graphic to the Stencilizer, and see for yourself. You can download a vector graphic of the fully bridged stencil, and cut it yourself, or you can have us cut it for you.
Made for Craft Cutters
Whether you have a Cricut or a Silhouette, you can cut these SVGs. Turn any image into a stencil and cut it yourself on any craft cutter that supports SVG. Just upload the appropriate file for each layer, cut from standard card stock, and paint wherever you like.
Get creative with an AI assist
AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. Tools like MidJourney can help you take your idea and turn it into stencil-ready art very quickly. Guide the AI with the right prompts to get a limited-color image isolated on a background of your choice, and you'll have no trouble generating SVGs with Bay Stencil.
Try a halftone CMYK stencil
Sometimes you just want to reproduce as many colors and details of an image as you can. But who wants to cut and paint 20 layers just to get 20 shades in the final image? With a CMYK color-separated stencil, you use just three colors: Cyan, Magenta and Yellow; plus black, to reproduce the full gamut of color.
Repeating stencils for wall and floor
Did you ever want to cover the wall of a room with tractors? I did. Stencils are a great way of reproducing a wallpaper effect, but with your custom image. Use MidJourney's 'tile' option to create endless variations of repeating patterns. Choose the one you like best, and Bay Stencil turns it into a cuttable, paintable SVG stencil.
Powdered sugar on a cake
Special occasion? Turn a chocolate sheet cake into a masterpiece of self-expression. Any two-tone stencil works, just use the lighter layer and sprinkle powdered sugar through the stencil onto the moist surface of the cake and wait for it to stick.
Your logo on a latte
Steamed milk makes a great surface to stencil a logo or simple image on. It's like clipart for coffee. Any simple two-tone color separation will work. Your steamed milk is the white surface, so you just use the dark stencil layer to sprinkle the cocoa or cinnamon onto the surface, and you're done.
Larger than mat
Your Cricut or Silhouette or Brother craft cutter probably cuts up to 12 inches on a side. But that doesn't stop you from stenciling larger images with ease. Download any image from Bay Stencil as a multi-panel stencil by specifying the size of your stencil media and the desired size of the image. Bay Stencil breaks up the image into panels for you so that you can cut and paint larger than your cutting mat.
Less is more
You might think that, the more color layers a stencil has, the better. But often less is more. Portraits of faces work great with three layers: dark, mid-tone and light. They're easier to cut and paint, and they're usually more elegant and pleasing to look at. Our advice: shoot for three layers, and add layers as needed.

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Tip #18:
Your logo on a latte
Steamed milk makes a great surface to stencil a logo or simple image on. It's like clipart for coffee. Any simple two-tone color separation will work. Your steamed milk is the white surface, so you just use the dark stencil layer to sprinkle the cocoa or cinnamon onto the surface, and you're done.
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