Nice!

Lovely stencil.

Thank you. It's my first try at such a thing, so I'm really excited that it turned out.

Very nice, especially for your first try.

Why did you decide to do Mandela?

I happened across a black and white picture of him in Rolling Stone that I thought would make a nice stencil. I do like Nelson Mandela, but I chose it because I wouldn't have to make a lot of changes in order to create the stencil. And I'm not sure he's really recognizable without his name on the file.

I didn't read the name of the file and I recognized him.

Oh, cool.

In that case, I chose Nelson Mandela because he represents the struggle to maintain humanity in an inhuman world.

If you have access to Photoshop, there is a really good filter for stencils called "Stamp". It'll take any full color photo and take it down to 2 colors.

Here is an example, (even though it's a bad picture):

http://webyaki.com/stuff_adam.gif

For some reason, I quite dislike the idea of using an image editing program. I'd prefer to work by hand where I can. Especially since I don't have a printer.

Karen: You drew that stencil out by hand and then cut it? Wow.

Um, no, that's not what I meant. I made a bunch of photocopies and upped the contrast by hand, with a Sharpie and some White Out. Then I cut it out on paper and stenciled it onto to some paperboard (software boxes are excellent) and cut it.

But I learned a lot with this process and I think that I will be able to draft them entirely by hand with some practice. But I don't think that using image editing software would teach me nearly as much.

Well yeah, I didn't mean hand drawn hand drawn. But, hand traced. Still nice work.

Yeah I could totally see how that would be cooler, even though both use some sort of technology. I suppose it's kind of like the difference between developing your own photos or taking them wal-mart.