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The craft fair in Portland last weekend made me toss all my pinstripe stencils in the trash.
A vendor there showed me how she freehands every curve with just a steady hand and a $3 brush, and now I can't even look at my own work without feeling like a fraud - has anyone else had a random stranger completely wreck their confidence like that?
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riley_taylor16d ago
Hold up, let me argue the other side here lol. Stencils are a tool just like brushes, and freehanding doesn't automatically make someone better. I watched a guy at a market last year spend 20 minutes on one sign that looked shaky and crooked, while another booth sold perfectly crisp pinstripe mugs using stencils in half the time. Your customers probably can't even tell the difference unless you point it out, so why punish yourself? That $3 brush trick is neat but it's just a party trick, not a mark of being a real artist. Your stenciled work got you into that craft fair, which means it was good enough for people to buy it.
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daniel_walker16d ago
Yeah @riley_taylor is right. My buddy tried freehanding after seeing something similar and his first batch looked like a toddler did it. He went back to stencils and his sales actually went up. Tools don't make you a fraud.
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