EMBELLISH IT: FREEZER PAPER STENCIL
Materials
» Printout of black and white image
» Freezer paper
» Self-healing cutting mat
» X-Acto knife
» Blank T-shirt or other fabric item
» Iron
» Fabric paint or silk-screening ink
for fabric
» Sponge paintbrush
click the menu option Image > Mode > Indexed Color,
then set the dialog box settings like so, and click OK:
Palette: Local (Adaptive)
Colors: 2
Forced: Black and White
Transparency: Unchecked
Dither: None
To do this in Microsoft Paint, save the image
as a Monochrome Bitmap. Just about every
graphics program should have a way to do this;
it’s just a matter of poking around in the menus
a bit to find it.
2. Cut the freezer paper.
Cut a piece of freezer paper the same size as your
printout. Place the freezer paper onto your cutting mat, waxy side down. Then place the printout
face up on top of the freezer paper. Use a couple
of pieces of tape to secure the printout to the
freezer paper.
3. Cut out the black space.
Using the printout as your guide, use the X-Acto
to cut out all the black space in the image, cutting
through both the printout and the freezer paper
at the same time. Try to leave the pieces of paper
intact even though you are slicing sections into
them. If there are a few areas of the printed image
1. Print out the image. that are just too detailed to cut out precisely, you
Print out a black and white image without too can fudge it and use your judgment to cut the area
many tiny details in it. You can easily make a black out in a more simple way.
and white image out of a photograph using any
graphics program. Basically, you want to have the 4. Iron the paper onto the shirt.
software convert the photo to be just 2 colors: Throw out the printout when you’re done with the
black and white. cutting. Now you have a piece of freezer paper with
To do this with Photoshop, load up the image and all of the segments of your image sliced into it. Lay
Successfully Turn Photos into Stencils
Increase the contrast. Clear the clutter.
High contrast works best. Ideally your photo should Try using the “lasso tool” to cut out the background
be high-contrast to begin with. This means lots of of the photo so that the main object in it is the only
very light areas and lots of very dark areas. If not, thing in the photo.
you can use your graphics program to bump the
contrast way up. In Photoshop, choose the menu
Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast and
then move the Contrast slider to the right.
