Welcome to the new/updated site! Since 2002, your old-school website for all things stencils. Please consider donating what you can to support the much-needed upgrade. Photo, video, links, and exhibit info submissions always welcome. Enjoy and stay curious.

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Just sayin...

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Putin torches peace (art: Rebel Bear, UK)

The Spectacle shone brightly yesterday in the White House.... but Rebel Bear shows where the real fire is! Follow the street art to see where the breadcrumbs lead: Stencil Archive searches for Putin and Ukraine.

Sunday Musk Slug-fest

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Salting the oligarch in Baltimore (ph ryansc0tt)

While uploading fresh stencil photos today, we realized that a stack of anti-Musk pics recently came to Stencil Archive from several different ways:

A Field Guide to Wheatpasting from CrimethInc

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Go small or large, creative or message-based. Wheatpasting is messy,  but also a great way to repeat your work, stencil-made or not.

A Field Guide to Wheatpasting

Everything You Need to Know to Blanket the World in Posters
2017-07-18
(Original Link with pdf poster, diagrams, images)

Like graffiti, wheatpasting is a direct action technique for communicating with your neighbors and redecorating your environment. Because it’s easy to mass-produce posters, wheatpasting enables you to deploy a nuanced, complex message at a large number of locations with minimal effort and risk. Repetition makes your message familiar to everyone and increases the chances that others will think it over. If you’re looking for posters to paste up, we offer a wide selection of poster designs to print out or order in bulk.

This is excerpted from our book, Recipes for Disaster, which details a wealth of related tactics.

Neanderthal Hand Stencils Dated in Spain

Neanderthals created hand stencil rock art over 66,000 years ago, U-series dating reveals
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Dario Radley
(Link)

A discovery in Maltravieso Cave, located in Extremadura, Spain, has fundamentally challenged long-held beliefs about the origins of human artistic expression.

Neanderthals created hand stencil rock art over 66,000 years ago, U-series dating reveals

Researchers have determined that hand stencils in the cave date back over 66,000 years, suggesting that Neanderthals, rather than modern humans, were the world’s first artists. This revelation highlights the advanced cognitive and cultural capabilities of Neanderthals.

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Panel GS I and sample locations for MAL6 and MAL7. The left picture shows the original photo, the right is the same picture after application of DStretch (correlation LDS 15 %). Credit: C. D., Standish et al., Journal of Archaeological Science, Reports (2025)

The research, conducted by an international team of archaeologists from the University of Southampton and collaborating institutions in Great Britain and Spain, utilized uranium-thorium (U-series) dating to establish the age of the artwork. Their findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, confirm that these hand stencils are among the earliest known examples of intentionally created visual art.

Classic Spolvero (stencil pouncing or dusting)

The technique of dusting: how the greats of the Renaissance executed paintings​
by Redazione , published on 30/09/2020
From Finestre sull' Arte

One of these techniques was to cast with an awl: the tip of the tool was passed through the paper to leave a groove on the surface. For geometrically patterned decorations, the pierced mold technique could then be used: the design was traced on a sort of stencil through which the contours of the figures could be etched on the surface. 

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Cotte and Simonot used Visible-NIR spectrum processed with L.A.M to see da Vinci's c. 1503 "Mona Lisa" polvero for the first time (2020, Journal of Cultural Heritage, Vol. 45)

The spread of paper, beginning in the 1360s and 1370s, was one of the most important innovations in art history: until then, the preparatory drawing for a pictorial work was traced directly on the support. This was the way it was done in Byzantine times, when the drawing was traced on the plaster, either freehand or with the help of tools (it was necessary to have gained enough experience not to make mistakes, since the correction of any errors was definitely complicated), and this was also the way it was done in medieval painting before paper became a common material. Several analyses conducted on painted crosses, for example, have found this type of technique: take as an example the Rosano cross, a 12th-century work (probably painted around 1120), which has recently undergone reflectographic investigations aimed at determining what lies beneath the painting.

Sunny Saturday Stencils

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A few extra photos from a past trip to Washington, DC, putting stencils in their historical place.

No rain in sight today here in San Francisco. Quick update before we go out and soak up the vitamin D. Thanks to the usual social media street art streams for most of these.

Flipping Bill Evans LP to B side right now..... OK, back to it.