Blue Brothers Coffee Mug Stencil: Free Download and Tutorial

In Stencil Stop’s Monday social media posts, we have two rules: we must create something related to a movie, and we must use stencils.

(Well, we kinda have to use stencils in every social media post.)

Typically, when we create these projects, we’ll do 4 or 5 together in a Martha Stewart-like flourish of stencils and creativity. We like to mix old-school and modern films across all genres in order to reach a diverse audience. Hanley, our resident boomer and connoisseur of all things pre-1990’s, recommended undertaking a Blues Brothers related project. Although I have never seen the movie, the poster intrigued me:

When designing a stencil, it’s good to have stark colors that are easily separable by the eye. The amount of black contrasting with the white in the suits is perfect. The hats and sunglasses help give even more form to the faces and heads, which allows us to reduce the detail required to show the image. Faces and hair are notoriously the most difficult details to show in stencil design, and in this image, they're a non-factor, allowing us to take the stencil size as small or as large as we'd like. We decided on painting a coffee mug because we actually had a mug from IKEA that matched the blue color in many of these posters.

In Adobe Photoshop, Image > Adjustments > Threshold is typically the best tool to see if something will be easy to turn into a stencil design. Watch what happens with the Blues Brothers poster:

Ridiculously easy. Simply drag the slider to and fro to determine your ideal level of detail. The text at the top came out so clean, too, that we decided to not only stencil their mugs on the mug, but also to put the movie title atop a frothy cup of joe itself.

Here's how The Blues Brothers movie coffee stencil project turned out:

Want to create your own Blues Brothers stencil? Click here to download Adobe Illustrator Blues Brothers files. Check out our custom stencils if you have another design, image or logo in mind.