Coordinating Colors and Inverting
Your thoughts of simple stenciling were wrong my friend. Every stencil is different. Every canvas is different. What am I getting at? The colors you choose to paint with and paint on are so, so important in the outcome of your art.
Basic rules of color coordination in stencils:
If you cut out the dark parts of the stencil, paint with a color darker than the canvas.
If you cut out the light parts of the stencil, paint with a color lighter than the canvas.
Meet me, in stencil form:
Let’s say I have this huge art project due tomorrow. 40% of my final grade. It is supposed to “say something” about myself. I’ve decided to stencil myself on my project. But I can’t mess up! It has to be perfect. After all, my whole semester grade counts on it.
Scenario #1. I’m at the craft store buying supplies. They have everything I might want. I can buy any color canvas and I can buy any color paint. But…what should I get? The most duh answer would be to buy white canvas and black paint. But if I wanted something else, I could as long as the paint is darker than the canvas.
Scenario #2. I’m already halfway through my project. It is on a black background. Obviously I can’t use black paint now. What do I do? This is a pretty bad situation…can’t get any darker than black. The only thing we can do here is add a white outline to the stencil and cut out the white parts. Now I can use any color I want, because nothing is darker than black.
Had I not known the basic rules of selecting colors, I probably wouldn’t have noticed a problem existed. I would have cut out the black part and failed my art project because the person in the stencil would not be recognizable.
Another example is this scenario brought to me by _lov3. She has a Johnny Depp stencil she would like to put on a green shirt.
Her question reads: “so do i have to cut out all the black and make islands for the white parts?”
My answer? Not exactly. If you cut out the black and paint it black you will end up with this:
I’m not a fan of the whole black box thing. If I were you, I’d cut out the white parts and paint it with a color ligher or brighter than the green.
Whatever you do, don’t cut out the white and use black paint. You will end up with an unrecognizable mess, like this:
