How to Make Multilayer Stencils for FREE

okay I'm gonna show you how I make my multi-layer stencils the freeway using which is a free image manipulation software it's kind of like Photoshop pretty powerful for free and I like it so let's get started first of all you need a photo my photo I have right here is of my cat I'm just gonna open with now take a minute to load up [Music] okay and I'm gonna put it at about 45% so we can kind of see it better so what you're gonna do is first take out the background all this junk back here is you don't really want that in your stencil so you're gonna grab the free select tool and just kind of click around this picture I'm doing it a little bit quickly if you're doing this for real you probably want to get in there and make it a little bit more accurate but this is just for so I'm not doing this all day all right I'll speed this up and when I finish I'll come back and talk okay now that we have that selected you're gonna go to select invert and before we do that I need to put so you're gonna like right click on the layer and add alpha Channel okay so now that we have that selected we're gonna go up here to edit and cut and that'll just take the background out and select none though this is kind of a really rough cut out whenever you have more time to do it you know make sure you get it more cut out along these edges and lines and stuff alright now that we have this picture we're gonna make some copies of this layer so just drag this layer down a few times say we're gonna do like a four layer stencil I usually keep my base layer in case I need to make another copy of it and then I'll make four copies on top of that now you're gonna figure out whether you want your top layer to be black or white and sometimes that's just going to depend on the picture this one I want the top layer to be black because there isn't a whole lot of black in the picture it's just dots and stuff so my very bottom layer is gonna be like a fully white outline of my cat my top picture up here is gonna be these black parts soon then we're gonna go make sure the top layer selected go to colors and threshold and then you're just gonna kind of set it like what feels best to you a lot of times if you're doing since we're doing four colors in this picture I don't want to get like all of the black to be black you know I'll put a little bit of whiteness in the black so that I can put a gray layer in there later see that looks pretty decent a little bit some of his eyes in general you do want to get like the darkest parts on this layer so if this were a person you would just get like their nostrils and like that lines of their eyes maybe some detail in the hair but this looks pretty good for my cat don't I click OK and then I'm going to use this tool here the select by color tool and click on the white and then I'm going to go to edit and cut and then you'll end up with this you know you just have the black select none underneath down here I'll go ahead and make like a layer that's white so we can see how that looks now if this were like a single layer stencil we would definitely want more of that black in there so we can see what it is right now it's just sort of like a couple of random black patches all right next layer go ahead and hide your top layer this layer here is gonna be our dark gray so make sure the layer selected go to colors and threshold and remember all those parts that were not black earlier I don't want to make it a blacker a black or black that looks pretty good there so I'll start okay and the color select tool and select the white and then edit and cut now on this layer if we want to make it look like if we want to be able to see like what the colors are gonna look like on our painting go ahead and do keep the color select tool and select the black on this layer and then we'll pick like our gray like a kind of a darker gray go to the bucket fill and just fill it in and if you wanna make sure you just click on your paintbrush make a fairly large brush you could just go over it really quickly make sure all of that layer is great okay select none and we'll look at our two layers on top of each other it's looking not too bad right now hide those it'll start on our light gray layer now with your light gray what you're gonna want to get in or see these like darker white shadows on him and these things here these sorts of not the brightest part the next to the brightest part go to colors threshold oh did I freeze okay now I didn't all right about right there is where I want that okay then we'll do our color select click on the white edit cut alright select none alright now select the black and we will pick a lighter gray and fill it in get our brush just to make sure we get everything okay that's look that's gonna look like so far all right hide all those layers let's do the last layer this one's the simplest and I usually do this one last because it's easy and also whenever I'm cutting out my stencils I'll do this one last so click on your last layer go to colors threshold and move it all the way over to the left and you'll see you'll have this nice outline that's a little bit janky because I didn't take my time don't push okay you don't have to delete any of that and here's our stencil all right now another thing in order to get this ready to print out and cut out whenever you're getting this picture ready to to print this is something that I do to save on ink you don't have to do this but is the thing that totally saves a lot of ink for me I'll take my color selection tool I'm going to start like on our our white layer our bottom layer here and I'll select that and I'll make a new layer transparency okay so we have this selection and on this layer make sure your colors are your top color here is black and I'll go to edit and Stroke selection and I usually put it on one pixel because it's just a thin line and you can see the outline and everything but we'll do like five to make it more visible leave everything else the same unless you have some specific way you want it to be done which you can do with these options and it's just going to outline this so whenever you print it out you have this to cut out here so let's go through and do this to these other layers they rely on this layer one outline okay and I'm just going to speed this up here so you can see what it looks like at the end okay now we have all of these layers and outline versions okay so this is what all of your outline layers are gonna look like on top of each other and take them one by one and export say stash layer four and then sometimes I'll put like the color if I have a color in mind that's like the black layer do I put black I'll tie JPEGs are small files and it's not really important to maintain a lot of detail because when you'll cut them out you'll be able to see where you need to cut so so that's fine just leave it the way it is export all right go to my desktop and here's my just the picture of the outlines here and when you print this out like these parts right here you're gonna have to make a bridge to the outside because if not you'll end up with just a big black ear but everything else should cut out fine and that's how you make these stencils in multiple layers okay poster raiser is what I use to make my stencils the size that I want them it's pretty simple you'll just put your image in that you want which is this for now um this depends on your image how you want it to be I recommend leaving it at point two because that's a good overlap for whenever you're taping the pages together if you have more than one page for image and this is if this is the size that you want like your whole image to be this is how many pages it'll take to print it out and it'll kind of show you a little preview right there of how that works let's say I just want it to be like eight so it get fit on one page you go to next and you'll just save the poster I have it to launch the PDF afterwards because I print it from like Adobe Adobe Reader and that's all you do poster raiser is really really simple and you can make images and pretty much any size you want well that's my tutorial and how I make my multi-layer stencils everything I use is free and I have links in the description bye

Channel: Leona Ryder Art

Views: 29,908

Keywords: tutorial, gimp, posterazor, how to, stencil, multilayer stencil, photoshop, make stencil, how to make stencils, cat, art, street art, spray paint, layered stencil, multi-layer stencil, software tutorial, macbook pro, mac

Id: gxjW9wcyrNo

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 21 2016