STENCILS AND SHIT

I'll start of by saying that the method for making this a stencil involves a 3d printer - I use a creality ender 3, you can use whatever you got probably as long as it works. You can probably easily adapt this to conventional stencil making (cutting it out of a piece of cardboard or plastic) but I like making stuff that's got a lot of detail and that would be a bitch and a half the traditional way.

Emblems are just neat - and I've been obsessed with making them for years. I wanted the gh0ul emblem to be reminiscent of old horrorpunk iconography and shit like that - so I took a picture of tarman, desaturated it, upped the contrast, and played with the brightness until I got a result that I liked - this made up the bulk of the actual eye catching element in the emblem, but not the bulk of the work.

When it came to making it circular and adding text there were plenty of avenues I could've gone down - trying to make circular text in GIMP (where I do most of my phot editing) though is tough as shit for some reason, so I cheated and did the circular portions in Blender (I use an older version because I don't like change, use what works for you). I started by adding a cylinder, scaling it down, deleting the top and bottom faces, and extruding inward so that I had a circular (enough) outer layer. Then I put down a font object, changed it to "gh0ul.neocities.org", and then I added a bezier circle, and finally I added a modifier to the font object to displace it along a curve (with the circle as the curve). Tweak it to your liking, resize it if it doesn't look good, etc. - then render it out in orthographic view with a transparent background (this makes it look flat head-on). Depending on whether you want an inner circle or not you can add another cylinder after the text - or don't, you're making it make it how you want it.

Now just drop it in GIMP and put it all together - center everything - and your emblem should be done. But what if you want to print it out? Then you gotta do more work to make sure it all prints together.

I print my stencils all together, there are two or three part stencils that you can make, but I don't have the time for that shit - if you wanna make sure you print it right you're gonna have to go through all the space that's gonna be printed and make sure it's all connected - every bit of it. This can be a redious process, and if you aren't careful like me, you're gonna have to go back and edit it over and over again like 10 times until you get it right - that's just the risk you run with this process. Just use the pencil tool and connect every floating bit you can back to a bigger piece until it looks like it'll print right.

Now comes the tedious part, you gotta make sure that the pieces you want to be printed are solid colors, no aliasing, hard edges, etc. - and the stuff you don't want to be printed is just transparency - then you gotta take that png, convert it into an svg (there are plenty of online converters for this) - then you gotta boot up blender (again). You're gonna need to go into your user prefences (located in the file tab up at the top) and go into add-ons and search for something like "import svg" - click that, save user prefences, maybe reboot blender if you have to.

Import the svg, scale it up because it's guaranteed to be tiny, center it to the best of your abilities, and then press "Alt+C" to convert the curves to mesh data - this will make your stencil a 3d mesh. Go into edit mode and select all, then extrude it up on the z-axis a little. You don't want it to be too thick, don't want it to be too thin either - just use your head with this one, nut up and eyeball it.

When you're done monkeying around with it, export it as an STL file and throw that shit into Cura (or whichever slicer you use) and again - scale it up because it'll still be tiny as shit. Here you can size it a little more properly - I use my stencils to make stickers, and I get my stickers at the post office - so I size the stencils to like 113mm on the x and y - you do you though. Slice it, and if there's any issues with the mesh it'll tell you, go back and fix them until there's no problems anymore. When it's done, get the gcode on your sd card, plug that shit in, let it print for like 4 hours, and then - you're done.

Enjoy your stencil, make up some stickers, wreak havoc, paint the world, whole nine yards - tell 'em gh0ul sent ya.

_{last updated: 08/01/2022}