First Trys – The Trial by Fire for a Stencil

Nov 21
2 min read

The first attempt at a new stencil is always special. Anticipation, skepticism, and sometimes the quiet awareness that certain areas might be tricky or that some layers may not turn out as hoped — while others work even better than expected. First tries serve as a test run, showing exactly where adjustments are still needed.

With multi-layer stencils in particular, testing makes absolute sense: only this way can you really see the final result. On paper, you can safely test color effects, which cuts work visually, and how accurately the registration aligns. Doing this directly on a door or another surface could go wrong — and not everyone wants to witness that. The test prevents mistakes and allows experimentation with strategy under real conditions.

The first attempt is usually very sharp-edged, not fully opaque, but already has more color than strictly necessary. This is useful for evaluation: it clearly shows how the layers interact and where improvements are needed. Mistakes are often intuitively anticipated, but when viewed in combination with the other layers, they can be corrected more deliberately — if they don’t resolve themselves by chance. The first attempt is rarely perfect, but it establishes a clear baseline for the second and possibly third try.

I usually keep my first tries and label them up to the third attempt. They not only show how a motif develops, but also how stencil work demands technical precision, patience, and iterative decisions. This process is just as much a part of the culture as the finished artwork.

Here are some of my first tries from this year.