To make our stencils we are going to use the convert command that comes with the ImageMagick package. The page that I used as a reference to get me started was this one straight from the ImageMagick website. It shows how to do lots of text effects that I don't use here.

Once you get started doing this type of thing, you will definitely be looking for some interesting fonts for your designs. The Web Page Publicity page and the1001 Fonts page have lots of free (as in speech) fonts for you to choose from. If you want to see the fonts being made available to the ImageMagick tools right now, issue the command

convert -list type

If you have a very new version of ImageMagick, you might have to replace the word "type" with the word "font".