Looking or tutorial to make a stencil

Hello,
I am looking to make a stencil. I use Paint Shop Pro. I don’t know how to set what I want to be cut out.
Can anyone point me in the right direction to make a stencil?

I am not familiar with Paint Shop Pro or the latest Corel Draw. My suggestion is that you start with Doug Green’s tutorials - he is amazing. https://www.youtube.com/user/DougGreenAustin/search?query=stencil

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If you are planning to make the stencil out of card stock and the design is very complex, your best bet would be to engrave away the open parts instead of cutting them . That way you won’t have little bits of cut card stock flying around and potentially blocking parts of your design. Here is an example of what I mean.

Paint Shop is a raster based program. If you want to make a cutting line, you’ll want to use a vector based drawing program to create it. All of the cutting lines for the laser are created along vector paths.

If this is your first exposure to the difference between rasters and vectors, it might help for you to read through this brief overview discussion first :slight_smile:

After that, you can choose a vector based drawing program (most people choose Inkscape because it’s free, although you can also use Illustrator if you have it, or CorelDraw or Affinity Designer). Those programs draw with vectors and we can cut along the vector paths.

The instructions for how to create the paths are different in each of those programs, but we have “experts” for all of them who can get you started. You’ll want to just choose the one you want to learn and ask questions for that program. (And be sure to tell folks which one you’re using, every time you ask.)

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I’m still getting the hang of this too, but w/ my GF, I’m glad I’ve gotten Inkscape to create vector files–and you “import” files for images that you want to etch–or use to create bitmap tracing (as way to outline the image).

Also great way to create a file with multiple elements–sometimes saving from Photoshop as a PNG will make it easier to import as well as reduce artifacts–but key is having a transparent background.

But I also did try making a stencil just by etching–multiple passes–but for what I wanted, opted to silk screen instead.

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