okay step one is to spray paint the bottom color this is the color that your final lettering or the graphic that you're using with your vinyl stencil is going a date I am just going to spray paint aboard but I propped it up so that I can just get a better coverage and just make sure that you spray um in short first and get a nice thin foam first and you don't need a spray paint the hole for you to see like the edges you just need to spray paint wherever you're going to have your vinyl if you're using vinyl from uppercase living the nice thing is that it comes with arrows around your expression what I like to do is take a yardstick or ruler and just draw lines so that I can find the center of my expression really quickly alright all of the excess tape and paper for the vinyl stencil has been cut off and as you can see I've already marked onto my board the center on each side as well as you can see the center on this vinyl stencil so now it's going to be really simple for me to line up where it goes when you're peeling off the backing paper of a vinyl stencil sometimes the vinyl will want to stick on to the paper like right here and that's okay just push it back down onto the tape and keep peeling it off at an angle now that I've got the vinyl stencil on to the wood one of the things you want to make sure to do is is to rub down the vinyl onto the wood because you want to make sure that it adheres really well and that way when you go to peel it off you're going to have very fine and crystalline the next step is to spray your topcoat and you're going to spray over the top of your vinyl and we've already made sure that it's adhered really well and again the first coat you do you just want to get a light coat on there so it can dry quickly and then so just continue to spray paint until you get the color that you want okay this is the best part of the project I've left the top coat of paint dry I had to take it in because it was pretty hot out here and I just let it cure inside for about a half hour to an hour and now I'm going to take a pair of tweezers and you can if you don't have a really sharp pair of tweezers you can use a pin really what you're trying to do is just getting trying to get just pick a little bit of the vinyl off on the edges and you're just gonna peel it away okay this is the last step and it's to distress your board now it's optional but I always like to do it because it adds a little bit of character so you just take some basic sandpaper and you just sand the edges you can go through both layers of spray paint or you can just stand directly to the wood