Building on my exploration of stencil art, I played around with a portrait of Samuel Beckett. I searched a bit on Google for images and found a number of reasonable ones that could be converted to stencils. Beckett has an excellent face, with defined lines, rim glasses, and wicked hair, making his portraits ideal for creating strong stencils.
I used my knowledge from the Alternative Berlin street art workshop with stuff I bought from the ACERECORDS online shop (they’re based in Basel). In particular, they have a heavy wax paper which is easy to cut with sharp edges. This Wax-O paper is soooo much better to work with than normal heavy weight paper that I tried in the past. It is also reusable and I’m going to use it for all my stencil work from now on.
I took my chosen portrait of Beckett (not sure who the original photographer was) and decomposed it in Photoshop by selecting colors and using that to mask and separate the image into positive and negative regions. Then I printed out the image on A4 paper and used that to cut out the stencil from the Wax-O paper. I decided to go with white and grey for the stencil.
