Monday, January 30, 2012

DIY Silhouettes

I have been wanting to make or buy silhouettes of my boys for quite some time. I think I even blogged about making DIY silhouettes once, but that probably involved Photoshop or Publisher or Picnik (BTW...what the heck am I going to do without Picnik?), which will totally work if you have that little thing called patience. I however, have very, very little patience, so I desperately needed an easy-peesy way of making silhouettes or I was going to have to turn to Etsy.

Then BAM, I came across this blog post, which led to this simple DIY silhouette tutorial and I have been thinking about making them ever since. On this Monday afternoon, after helping Jackers with a project, I had loads of motivation to work on some of my own projects. 

And silhouettes of my boys it was! 
Why finish the table and chairs I have been rambling about for the last year?
Disclaimer...they are not perfect, but I think kinda close. Technically, they should be the same size and so I may redo Owen to make his the same size as Jack. I also need to clean up the bottoms as I have to much body. Lastly, I know Jack's silhouette is crooked, but I was working quickly as both boys were needing my attention and the sun was going down so I was losing light for picture taking.

The how to is that I truly followed this tutorial, but I will give you a quick rundown being that it was so easy and probably took me only minutes to complete.

1. Take a silhouette photo of your child, spouse or pet.
 2. Print out the photo on card stock type of paper.

3. Using a sharp scissors, cut out the silhouette.

4. Paint the photo with black acrylic craft paint.

5. Let the photos dry.

6. Align the silhouette evenly on a piece of white card stock and tape or glue them down.
7. Pop them in a frame of your choice. 

My choice of frame for the silhouettes are these large Ikea frames. However, I'm not sure they will stay in these for long. You see, I have another project in the works (the home for these silhouettes) and it's a kids art wall.

This is my inspiration...

I have the chalkboard portion complete and now I'm just working on the top portion that I will fill with art and frames. I would love to put these silhouettes here and so in order to use the space to its greatest potential I just need to scale down the frame size.
More about this later though!

DIY silhouettes of my boys have been attempted and I think successfully completed!

Sigh.

Can you see my boys?
They picked themselves out right away, so that is a good sign!

1 comment:

Anne Wallisch said...

This is such a neat idea. The boys will have so much fun with this!
HHKK