Sport-style Face-painting Decal Stencil

Ss, I've been seeing a growing number of people around San Francisco with peculiar facial adornments.

Under each eye, they wear a sticker, mainly black, with an icon in the middle that apparently represents some local sporting organisation or team.  They say it is "football" or "baseball", but the former looks more like the famous game of "hand-egg", and the latter does not seem to be a sport, as it appears to consist largely of consuming large amounts of beer and junk food whilst watching grown men have public temper tantrums.

Anyway, I thought, why can't we proclaim our support for Instructables in the same decorative manner?  One presumes that such adhesive icons could be printed commercially, but this is Instructables, and there is a laser cutter in the corner...

Thus was born the Robot Face Decal Stencil.

Using Corel Draw, I started with an EPS file of robot (available from here for your own experimentation), and simplified it dramatically.

I then split the image into three sections for stenciling purposes - an outline of Robot as a whole, a background to create the "greasepaint" stripe, and the details of Robot's body.

That took only a couple of minutes to type, but took a couple of hours to actually do...

(I have attached several versions of the file to this step, so that you can create or modify your own stencils as you wish.)

Cutting the stencil was a s simple as putting the card in the cutter, powering up and hitting "Print".

I took a couple of preliminary runs to check that the detail worked, and to get the power and speed settings right (check your own cutter's manual for better details), then ran off two cheek-sized stencils, and one larger (possibly for a shoulder?), before I realised that I had run out of the thin card I scavenged from a small box.

Using the stencil is simple, especially if you have a friend to help you.

Choose where you want it to go, then dab your face-paints through the stencil with yellow or orange facepaint to make the Robot's body (if you can't find face-paint, then I am told that tempera will do the same job).

Move the stencil to add the "greasepaint" stripe, and dab through the holes with black.

Give the paint a few moments to dry off, then add the third layer, the details to turn the yellow blob from stage one into the Robot we know and love.

Display proudly!

_{(Many thanks to Carley and Nicole for agreeing to model for me - they saved you all having to look at Dave or myself wearing the stencil!)}

It's a stencil - what can't you apply a stencil to?

You can re-size the image and apply it to all sorts of things - laptops, bedroom walls*, school books, clothing - and you can use all sorts of paints through the stencil.

Why don't you use your imagination, and then post pictures of how you have used the stencil?


_{*Ask a parent first!}