A small experiment to use stencils created with a laser cutter to create a painting with acrylics.

First I took a photograph and fiddled around with the color curves:

Then I ran some filters (median etc) to get rid of noisy areas. After that I created 2 layers (one for each the darker blue tones). More filtering and some manual painting made sure the stencils can be made out of them (all parts of the stencils need to be connected with no "islands" left).

The 2 layers look like this:

Then I loaded the frames into Inkscape, where I traced them to have vector outlines, which are needed for the laser cutter:

As you can see, I also added registration marks to the top corners, so that I could align the stencils correctly.

The cut stencils look like this:

I taped the stencil on a canvas and applied the first color using a small foam roller. After drying I did the same with the second stencil/color

After some manual finishing touched (e.g. white dots in the eyes) the result is this: