Not happy with your Christmas presents? Is one of your New Year’s resolutions to do more DIY stuff? Look no further! We’ll show you how to create your own stencil art!

Stencil art is becoming increasingly popular so we thought we would show you how to easily create your own stencils.

Stencils can be used for loads of things, not just for spraying on walls (which obviously you shouldn’t do – unless the wall is your own). Maybe you have recently bought a cheap bookshelf from IKEA and want to add some decorations to it? Do you have an old chair lying around that you’d like to spice up a bit? A lampshade? The possibilities are endless!

After choosing your surface, the question then is what should you decorate it with? For us it was obvious. We didn’t want a hippopotamus for Christmas – we wanted a giraffe. Unfortunately no one – not even Santa – was kind/rich/irresponsible enough to give us one (maybe because of the way we treated our goose), so we decided to make our own giraffe stencil so we can put giraffes all over the office!

We downloaded a template, cleaned up the lines and added a nice looking stencil font to go with it. Then we converted the artwork and font into cut lines (image on the right) and sent it to print.

We decided to use Diginate Wall Stickers, as they are perfect for creating stencils. They are removable so you can stick the stencil on, paint over it, remove it and repeat. The stickers are even washable!

The equipment:

This is a close up of our cut stencil sheet.

We had this nice wooden board lying around, so instead of throwing it away we decided to use it to create some art.

For our paint we decided to go for a high quality fluorescent orange spray paint by Montana. We also got a protective mask. Safety first!

The process:

We carefully peeled the sheet off…

…making sure only the right parts came off.

We then stuck it on the board, leaving one corner so we could easily peel it off again.

Then we got our paint out!

We made sure to have every cut area filled in with paint…

…before peeling off the stencil. We decided to peel it off while the paint was still wet, to make sure the paint didn’t get stuck to the sticker.

The finished product:

After leaving it to dry for a little while our artwork is ready. What a handsome giraffe!

The colour came out really well and contrasts well with the wood.

The artwork looks very crisp around the edges, though it stills obviously has the sprayed-on stencil effect. Now we just need to find some more things to digiraffify (yes, that’s a word now)!

Tips:

Creating your own stencils is quite easy, although it requires a bit of planning – especially when creating the artwork.

If you are working with text you will need a proper stencil font. You probably have at least one installed already, but you can also find a good selection of free stencil fonts here and here.

It can be a bit tricky to create your own image from scratch, but thankfully there are loads of free templates out there (though some of them will need some reworking). You can find some of them here, here and here.