The Logic of Stencils

   For the Harriet Tubman Project, my classes are designing silhouettes based on the life story of HT. My intention is to have them design their images as stencils, and then we will print them on boards.  
      We have a wonderful new machine that will cut the stencils for us; the Silhouette Cameo 3. There is a bit of a learning curve to make it work, both in the design process and in learning how to use the machine, but we are all making progress.
    On the left is a double sized cut from one of my students' thumbnails from last class, and on the right is one of my own images.
    The student's work is pretty close. It has some design issues and it needs to be blown up and cleaned up, but this one gives me hope that this will actually work.
    I'm counting my image a success as well, even though instead of a silhouette, it is a line drawing/cut, and I lost some areas during the process. But, I'm really impressed with how fine the lines are, and it would just take another session of making the image fit the logic of stencils  (all negative areas have to connect somehow; no islands!) to make it work. Also, next time I might make the lines cut a little thicker. Right now, I'm not so sure the ink/paint will have enough of an opening to make a mark in some areas.
    Tomorrow, I'll try to print both of them a la poupee, which means dabbing the paint into the openings of the stencil.
    I will confess that it's a bit of a relief to get this far with this much success.