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This tutorial will walk you through creating a 3 layer stencil painting from scratch using basic art materials.
 
Getting Started: Things You Need

Paints
Acrylic paints or Spray Cans, but Oil Paints will work too.
Medium
Stretched Canvas (Medium texture). About $5 for a 16″x20″. I
Paper
Tracing Paper to hand-trace over the printout.
Markers
To trace over the printout and fix areas on canvas.

 
Picking a Subject
This step can be hard for beginners. Try to choose an image with hard shadows and highlights, these present well defined light and dark shapes and clear contrast.

 
Source used for this painting
 
 
 
 
Im using a pic of Australian model Emily Scott.
Why ? It’s easy to separate the different shades in her dirty blond hair to create texture. Uniform hair color would appear flat
The picture is from a Zoo Magazine article about her. More about her : Wikipedia: Emily Scott 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Step One: Photoshop
Open your Image in Photoshop. We can create some abstraction by enhancing the Levels, Saturation and Brightness/Contrast. This creates a separation in the even skin tones.
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
Crop: use the Crop tool to resize the canvas to her head and shoulders only. Concentrating on just that portion will allow for more detail. 
 
 
 

 
Levels To get color separation bring up the ‘Levels’ using ‘Ctrl + L’
or navigate to ‘Image > Adjustments > Levels’.
 
The black triangle on the left represents the darkest pixel and the white triangle represents the lightest. the range between them is the tonal range from dark to light. Bring these sliders together to reduce the range and replace the smooth tone with harder edges between colors.
In this example its 101 for the dark and 130 for the light.
 
The goal is to bring it down to 3 or 4 primary colors. Red, yellow, black and blue.

 
 
Step Two: Trace by hand
Further separation is possible in photoshop but it will create jagged edges and leave blocks of color missing.Time to print out the Image and trace over it by hand to get the best result.

 

Place the tracing sheet over the printout.
Using markers trace over the image using only 3 colors.
Start with the lightest color and move towards the darker ones in order.
Keep the lines clean and colors in separate blocks.
Use your discretion to add or remove sections and smoothen jagged lines.
The goal is to create a vector looking image.

 
 
 
 
Trace Results: I have replaced the blue from the printout with black to reduce the colors. 
 
 
 

I’m now ready to put trace this on canvas and color it in.

Step Three: Painting on Canvas
Begin with tracing an outline of your rough trace on the canvas.
Start with the lightest, most-used color and work your way up to the darker.

Finished Painting

Here is the finished painting. The canvas size is 40″ x 30″

 


 
 
Warnings

• Watercolor or other water based paints will not as they tend to mix into each other.
 
Tips
• For a single-layer stencil its best to switch the Image mode to Grayscale before adjusting levels to get better contrast.

• Tape down the tracing sheet on top of the printout to prevent it from sliding around while tracing.

• You can replace the trace by hand, with an illustrator trace if you have the skills

• Having a lightbox will make the tracing process much easier. You can find them brand new for $30-50 on Ebay

• If your tracing skills arent the best I recommend using a cheap projector.
Im using the Tracer Jr($25) from Micheals.

• Use a sharpie to clean up the edges of the black layer. This gives it a more Stenciled look.