Turn a photo into a cut-ready black-and-white stencil.
Make a Cut-Ready Stencil from Any Photo
A stencil turns a photo into something you can paint, spray, or cut. The image is reduced to black and white, and the black shapes become the areas you cut out or paint through. This tool does that conversion in your browser, with a threshold slider that decides where black ends and white begins.
The tool is free and works entirely on your device. Your photo is never uploaded to a server, so you can stencil a portrait, a logo, or a piece of artwork without sending it anywhere. The result downloads as a PNG you can print and cut.
How the Threshold Works
Every pixel in your photo has a brightness value. The threshold is a line drawn through those values: everything brighter than the line becomes white, and everything darker becomes black. Move the slider one way and more of the image turns black; move it the other way and more turns white.
There is no single correct threshold. A portrait usually looks best somewhere in the middle, where the face keeps its shape without turning into a solid blob. Start at the default, look at the preview, and nudge the slider until the main shapes read clearly. The invert checkbox swaps black and white, which is handy when you want a light design on a dark surface.
Picking a Photo That Stencils Well
High-contrast photos stencil best. A face lit from the side, a bold logo, or an animal against a plain background will all give clean shapes. Low-contrast photos, where the subject and background are nearly the same brightness, collapse into muddy patches.
Simplify before you upload. Crop tight, and if the background is busy, blur it or replace it in your phone editor first. Remember that stencil art is meant to be bold. Fine detail will not survive cutting, so a photo that reads well at a glance will stencil well too.
Cutting and Painting Your Stencil
Print the stencil on card or stencil film for cutting, or on plain paper if you plan to paint through it once. Use a sharp craft knife on a cutting mat, and cut slowly around the shapes. Keep the bridges, the thin strips that hold floating pieces like the middles of letters, intact. Without bridges, those pieces fall out and the design breaks.
For spray painting, hold the can about twenty centimetres from the surface and use light, even passes. Two thin coats beat one heavy coat, which bleeds under the edges. For fabric, use fabric paint and a sponge brush, dabbing rather than brushing so paint does not seep under the stencil.
Ideas for Using Stencils
Stencils suit t-shirts, tote bags, walls, wooden signs, and skateboards. Craft sellers use them to repeat a logo across products without redrawing it each time. Teachers use them for classroom art projects, and street artists use them for quick, repeatable designs. A stencil made from a pet’s photo makes a personal gift that no shop sells.
The tool needs no account and no install. Upload, set the threshold, download, and start cutting. Your photo stays private, and the stencil is ready in seconds.
Two-Layer Stencils and Advanced Ideas
Once you are comfortable with a single-layer stencil, try a two-layer version. Generate the same photo twice, once with a low threshold and once with a high threshold. The low-threshold version gives you the darkest shapes, and the high-threshold version gives you the mid-tones as well. Paint the first layer in one colour, let it dry, then align the second layer over it and paint in a second colour. The result has shading and depth that a single layer cannot achieve. Alignment is the tricky part, so mark two small registration crosses on both prints, outside the design, and line them up before painting. Another advanced idea is to cut the stencil from adhesive vinyl instead of card, which sticks to curved surfaces like mugs and bottles. Vinyl is thinner and cuts more cleanly, but it is single-use, so keep the printed master safe. Whatever you try, keep your first stencil simple. A bold, simple design that paints cleanly beats a complex one that bleeds every time.
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