How to Stencil Your Own Homemade T-shirt

by Blake Suarez

Part 1: The Stencil

There are plenty of ways to make your own t-shirt, such as using screen prints, fabric pens, heat transfers, stencils, or vinyl transfers. Of all of them, one of the simplest and most effective way of producing quality shirts is by stenciling your design. And to get you started you will have to find an image.

Now, considering I was overwhelmed by a feeling of narcissism today, it is perfectly reasonable for me to have chosen a photograph of myself to stencil. I will be using photoshop to create this stencil, but I want you all to know that any digital imaging program works. You can also freehand your stencil, which doesn’t involve any editing at all, instead it you just cut out your image by eye based on the shadows and highlights. If this is the case you can skip the initial steps and jump to Step 5 of this tutorial.

Materials:

* 1 Image you want to cut
* 1 Xacto Knife
* Tape
* Stencil material (cardboard, acetate, manilla folder, or paper)

Step 1: Get your image

This is the image I have chosen to stencil.

Step 2: Select what you want to stencil

Now, personally I don’t want to stencil the background of this image. So I will be selecting only my face. This can be done in a number of ways, such as the lasso tool, magic wand, the marquee tool and in photoshop the quick mask. Here I have made the selection with the lasso tool.

Now copy the selection and paste it into a new document. This is what I have come up with:

Step 3: The Cutout Tool

There are a number of ways to simplify the image for cutting. You can either print out the image you have and freehand, like I pointed out earlier. Or you can use one of the many options your imaging program provides you with. In photoshop, you can use the cutout filter.

After applying the filter, I decided to simplify the image even further by raising the levels of the image. In other words, I darkened the image. This can be done with the burn tool, which most imaging programs have.

This is the image I have so far:

Step 4: Islands and Bridges

Now that you have the image you’d like to cut, you must understand how to cut it. Even though the image above is what I want to cut, I must make it cuttable. And this means getting rid of all of the islands I have by making bridges. An island is an area of white that is surrounded on all sides by black detail. If you were to cut out the stencil without bridges… you would end up cutting only the perimeter and all of the detail would be lost.

To create a bridge, simply erase some areas, like I have done below:

Bridges are key in this case, but don’t worry about how it looks… you will be able to get rid of these bridges when it comes to painting your shirt.

Step 5: Cutting the Stencil

Now that you have your image ready, it is time to cut. Go ahead and print out your image.

Gather your stenciling materials. You can use any material to create the stencil. I prefer the more economical methods of recycling old cereal boxes and manila folders. But if you’d like accuracy and smoothness, buy some acetate paper or some transparency sheets.

Now begin cutting away at all of the black areas on your image. When you are done, you will have a perfectly functional stencil to paint a shirt with.