Photo Stencil

 

For this project, we used a photo and put it into photoshop. I had never used photoshop before, and that was one of the things I learned during this project. In photoshop, I converted my photo onto a three color scale, and chose the colors yellow, orange, and pink. We took a picture of the altered photo and projected it so that we could trace each color onto poster board. Then, using an exacto knife, we cut out what we traced to create three stencils. We taped each stencil onto painted cardboard. First, I spray painted orange, then yellow, then pink. When you spray paint, you have to be careful because there are many errors you can make. If you paint on top of a color before it dries (so both colors are wet), it turns out looking something like this: 

 

One mistake I made was pulling up the stencil too early after I spray painted... It smears the paint!

However, you don't want to pull it up too late either, as this will cause the dried paint to stick to the stencil and peel off. Another common error was cutting too much out of the stencil and missing features of the photo.

 

I think my project was successful because it turned out looking quite nice and matched the photo. I like the way I contrasted the spray paint colors with the blue background. I was able to cover up my mistakes because they were only on the first layer, and the final product looked very neat.