Easy Stencil Tutorial

Some friends have been asking how I achieve the hand painted look, that can be found all over my house. Here is an easy, inexpensive way to do it.

I have had this perfectly rusty, beautiful tin sitting in my studio. Found it at a garage sale for $1
SCORE!!

I knew I wanted to paint it, but never came up with anything too clever, so I decided to brand it. I do live in Texas, after all.

First I measure the area that will be painted. In this case, the interior of the tin was 7" x 23". I use Adobe, either Photoshop or Elements, and open a new, blank file that is whatever the size I am painting, for this 7" x 23". (You could also do this in Word, set the page orientation to landscape and set your margins to be 7" x 23", it would be two pages) Then I either add the text, or image. So in this case I added "WILSON", and tried different fonts, until I found one I liked. Then I kept making the font larger, and larger until it fit in my 7" x 23" box. I took the size number (134 pt.) and then went into Word, typed each letter out on a separate line in 134 pt font. I printed it out on plain office paper, and cut it out with an x-acto knife. (In areas that you might cut the center of the "A", "O", "Q", etc -in this case the loop of the W, I just use small pieces of tape to hold it together.)

Trimmed each letter to fit in the space.

It helps if you can tape your paper to the object you are painting.


I used a dry sponge brush, and acrylic craft paint. To achieve the rusty old look, I layered burnt umber and a spice brown color. I did not mix them, this makes it look naturally worn.


Just dabbed in the letters.

Then I decided it was too dark, so I added a tan color on top.


Took off the paper. And voila!

I would also recommend using a heavier paper, like card stock if it's a stencil you think you may use more than once. If it is a large area, remember you can print multiple pages and piece it together with tape. Also, if it's a large symmetrical stencil, you can print out half, paint half, let the stencil dry and flip it over. This will save a lot of cutting time.

Join Kimba at A Soft Place To Land for more fun DIY projects:

http://asoftplacetoland-kimba.blogspot.com/2009/08/diy-day-and-giveaway.html