Stencil Maker
Printable high-contrast stencils. Set the options to suit you, and download the result at full resolution with no watermark.
Click anywhere in this box or drag a photo in. Set the options on the left, then hit Generate — your original stays untouched, you always see both.
+ Choose a photoSee it in action — real before & after
How to use Stencil Maker
Upload the photo
A clear JPG, PNG or WEBP. Portraits work best when the face fills a reasonable part of the frame — a distant full-body shot gives the model very little face to work from.
Pick the style or write your own
Choose a preset, or describe the medium you want: line weight, palette, texture, era. Naming the medium precisely is what separates a good result from a vague one.
Generate and download
Full resolution, no watermark. Good enough to print, use as an avatar, or send to someone as a gift.
Why use Stencil Maker
What Stencil Maker does
Printable high-contrast stencils.
Any ratio you need
Square for an avatar, portrait for a print, wide for a banner or a cover. Set before generating.
Cheaper than a commission by orders of magnitude
An illustrated portrait typically runs from $40 to several hundred. A pack of credits starts at $2.
Recognisable after the conversion
Facial proportions and the details that identify a person are carried into the new medium rather than replaced by a generic character face.
A real change of medium
Brush texture, ink weight, cel shading, moulded plastic, woven canvas. The material of the image changes, not just its colours.
Consistent across a set
Run several photos through the same style and they look like one commission rather than a pile of unrelated experiments.
What Stencil Maker changes
Convert this to a two-tone stencil: pure black and white only, simplified connected shapes with no floating islands, and a contour clean enough to cut. For photographic results, use realistic camera detail: natural skin texture and pores, believable eyes and hair strands, coherent lighting and shadows, correct anatomy and perspective, and matching sharpness across face, neck and body. Avoid waxy skin, over-retouching, distorted features, face-morphing and pasted-on faces. If the app intentionally creates artwork, render the requested medium consistently across the whole image instead of forcing photorealism.
Your face, bone structure and skin tone are held fixed on every generation — only what is described above is changed.
Stencil Maker for prints, avatars and gifts
The same conversion serves very different ends — a profile picture, a framed print, a card, a set of matching avatars for a group.
Covers and thumbnails
A stylised image survives text overlaid on it far better than a photograph does — the flat areas give the type somewhere to sit.
Creative reference
A quick look at a concept in a given medium before committing to commissioning it properly.
Profile pictures and avatars
A stylised portrait stands out in a feed of photographs, and it stays readable when a platform shrinks it to 40 pixels.
Prints and framed gifts
A converted portrait of a person, a couple or a pet is the kind of gift people keep, and it costs the price of the frame.
Key highlights of Stencil Maker
Benefits
Done in under a minute
No brief, no back and forth, no revision round. Upload and generate.
Try several styles for the price of one commission
Compare mediums on the same photo instead of committing to the first description that sounded good.
Nothing to learn
No illustration software, no tablet, no understanding of layers or masks.
Keeps the likeness
The point of a portrait is that it is of someone. Identity preservation is applied to every person-editing prompt.
Full resolution and no watermark
Print it, frame it, use it commercially. Nothing is stamped on the result.
What people use it for
What it is mainly used for
Printable high-contrast stencils. Set the options to suit you, and download the result at full resolution with no watermark.
An avatar that is not another selfie
Stylised portraits read as a deliberate choice in a grid of photographs, and they stay legible at tiny sizes.
A gift that took no planning
A parent, a partner or a pet converted into a print, ordered the same evening.
Group and team sets
Everyone in one style — for an About page, a group chat, a wedding party or a D&D table.
Pet portraits
The single most requested illustrated portrait, and the one people are most reliably delighted by.
Prompt ideas
Presets cover the common styles. If you write your own, describe the medium as a maker would: line, colour, texture, era. Vague adjectives like "beautiful" or "high quality" do nothing; "thick ink outlines, flat colour, halftone shading" does a great deal.
Describe the line
"Thick uniform ink outline" reads completely differently from "soft pencil with no outline", even in the same palette.
Constrain the palette
"Muted earth tones, four colours only" produces a coherent image. Left open, most models reach for saturated everything.
Give an era or school
"1970s screen print", "Renaissance oil", "90s anime cel". Era carries a whole set of conventions in two words.
Say what happens to the background
"Flat single-colour background" for an avatar, "stylised landscape behind" for a print.
Keep the likeness explicitly
Adding "keep the face recognisable" helps on the more abstract styles where the medium starts to dominate.
Set the framing
"Bust, shoulders up" for an avatar, "full figure" for a poster. This decides how much of the style you actually see.
More about Stencil Maker
A stylised portrait does something a photograph cannot: it survives being shrunk. At forty pixels in a comment thread a photograph becomes a smudge, while flat colour and a strong outline stay legible. That is why illustrated avatars outlast the trend that produced them.
The failure mode worth knowing about is the generic character. Plenty of tools will produce a competent illustration that is recognisably nobody. Keeping the proportions of a specific face inside a new medium is the harder problem, and the only one worth solving.
Turning a photograph into another medium used to be a commission. You found an illustrator, described what you wanted, waited a week and paid for it. Stencil Maker does the same conversion from a photo you already have, in about a minute.
Getting the best result from Stencil Maker
- Soft, even light in the source photo gives the best result almost regardless of what you are generating.
- Judge every result at full size, not zoomed out. Problems hide at small sizes.
- Generate two or three times before deciding. Results vary between runs, and the first is not reliably the best.
- Check hands, text, jewellery and glasses in any result before sharing it — those are still where image models most often slip.
- Choose the aspect ratio before generating rather than cropping afterwards.
- If one model ignores part of your instruction, switch to the other and run it again.
- Keep the original file. It is a better base for the next attempt than a generated image is.
- For a matching set, keep the same source photo and style and change only one variable.
It runs online — nothing to install. Explore the rest of our AI Creative Apps, or open the full AI photo editor for more control.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does the stencil maker work?
What photo should I upload?
Is the stencil maker free?
Will it still look like me?
Do you watermark the download?
Will the portrait still look like the person?
Can I use the result commercially or print it?
Does it work on pets and objects, or only people?
Why does the same photo give different results each time?
Find another way to use Pixel Shine
Explore tools grouped by the outcome you want, including social media, LinkedIn, ecommerce, real estate, photography, creators and weddings.
