Making small stencils

I know that a lot of people will not invest in the cost it takes to make your own stencil, but I did because I have future builds in the works that need small stencils. If you have ever looked for small stencils that will fit on a pistol or even a slide you cannot find them. If you go to a place that will cut you some small stencils, all they do is shrink one down to size you need. Doing this makes the detail of the stencil useless. The detail is so small that the stencil cutter cuts over lines or cuts so close that small pieces will roll out.

Here is what I do to make them work.

First, I'll talk about what you need if you go this route.

You need a good PC that can handle doing photo editing. I have a laptop with a graphic card. A Chrome book will not work.

I use a Silhouette Cameo 4, it can cut a 12"x12" stencil, but you do not need one this big for what I am doing with guns or even mug stenciling. I find that the basic program that comes with the Silhouette is just fine for what I'm doing but this will just let you adjust size and cut stencils. You still need something like Paint Shop Pro for editing artwork so it can be made small or just to change parts of a stencil you what to use. So, let's get started.

Here is what I want to use in my next build. Looks nice and clean at this size but I need to shrink it down to a 2"x2".

When you just resize this stencil, here is the problem. In the Silhouette program it wants to create these double lines that when shrunk down small it is just impossible to weed and will not cut clean. Lines are just to close.

First, I opened up my photo editing program and opened my artwork.

The circle shows the biggest problem, all the teeth and nose and any other small little detailed spots will just be a spot the size of lead in a pencil. It would be really hard to weed out if it just didn't roll out when trying to cut the stencil.

ou can see how I connected some of the detail together to make them bigger so when shrunk down they will still be there and big enough to weed. Another thing I did was change the background to black. The reason for this is the stencil program picks up on lines. The more contrast you have the better. I found that using black and white seems to work best. If I have artwork that has colors in it, I will turn it into a negative to get a better contrast.

Here back into the Silhouette program you see the final step before cutting.

See how I connected the teeth, eye and nose. All so the double lines are gone making weeding easier and should cut clean. If anyone want to jump down this rabbit hole we can go into more depth on how to set settings just ask. There is a lot of stuff I have not figured out on the Silhouette yet but will someday.