Digital Stenciling With a Twist

Happy Thursday! Ron here with another digital tutorial. We're gonna look at digital stenciling again, but this time with a little twist!

Before we get started, I have to share how this blog post came to be…

A few weeks ago, I blogged about how to create a stencil effect digitally. If you'd like a refresher, click HERE.

Shortly after that blog entry, Winter PSL started and the second week challenge was to use stencils. During that challenge, CS Member Melissa (sarala557), posted a message to her PSL "Pixels" digital team about how she thought of using the digital stencil technique in reverse and posted a couple of cool samples. It just so happened that during that same week, I was thinking about that same thing one morning on my drive to work. Yeah, my mind wanders a bit on my drive and I often come up with some crafting ideas! I told Melissa that I was planning on blogging about this, and here we are!

Here's one of Melissa's layouts showing the reverse technique:

To recap digital stenciling, all you do is drag a stencil or stamp onto your canvas, command or ctrl+click on the thumbnail of the stamp/stencil layer to select it with marching ants, hide the layer, create a new layer and then 'paint' with a fuzzy brush inside the stencil/stamp area, changing colors and varying opacity as you will to get the desired effect.

To reverse stencil, just add 1 step - AFTER you create the new layer, but BEFORE you start to paint, choose 'Inverse' from the Select menu (Shift-CTRL-I in Windows, Shift-Command-I on a Mac) - this will select everything except the stamp/stencil image.

When you paint, you're coloring the background and leaving the image untouched. This can create some really cool looks. Here are a couple of ideas to get you started:

For this first one, I used a stencil file from Artifacts and used a spatter brush in a fairly large size in 4 or 5 different colors at a very low opacity (39%):

Then I decided to turn the stencil layer white, add a little inner shadow for depth, layered it on black and one of the Jubilee backgrounds, add a sentiment stamp and came up with a digital birthday card in about 15 minutes!

In this next sample, I used a Wildflowers background, added 3 stamp images, merged the stamps into a single layer and reverse stenciled in white at 29% opacity using a huge (2500 pixel) chalk brush. This took less than 10 minutes to make.

And for more ideas, check out Melissa's forum post HERE.

Okay, enough inspiration - now go create some wonderful digital stencil art of your own!