Not Your Grandmother's Silhouettes

I have a large blank wall in the hallway of my apartment which I wanted to dedicate to family pictures. Instead of doing the over-done collage pictures I decided to make silhouettes. These wouldn't be ordinary black and white silhouettes, but with different patterns and colors.

First, I took side profile pictures of my family members against a blank white wall. Be sure to turn the flash off, otherwise you'll get a shadow that will be hard to follow for tracing purposes. Get prints of the pictures or just print them off on regular computer paper as all you will be doing is tracing them. Also, have several choices of patterned and solid paper, fabric, wrapping paper, whatever you want to use. Don't use construction paper as it frays very easily.

I then went to second hand stores and thrift stores to find some wooden frames of all different shapes and sizes. These can be found for just a few dollars! The color did not matter as I would be spray painting them. I even found an old tray to use as a frame.

Next, I lined the frames up on the floor and chose who was going where. The family consists of 4 boys (including the dog) and 4 girls, so I went with a boy girl boy girl theme. I also decided what paper would be used for each person. Even though they were all different, I made sure mismatched colors didn't go next to each other, all the backgrounds were patterned and all the silhouettes were solid.

Now onto spray painting. I picked an olive green spray paint for the frames. Green is one of my favorite colors, so usually whatever else I pick matches along with it.

This was a very fast process as the spray paint takes just 10 minutes to dry. I did 2 coats of the green and one coat of a clear flat finish.

After the frames were all set, it was time to trace the pictures onto tracing paper that can be found at any craft store.

Carefully cut the tracing out, you might want to use small cuticle scissors as well as large scissors for certain areas.

If you do not want a template to keep for future projects, skip this step. I traced the tracing paper cut outs onto a thicker paper, such as poster board and cut those out. Use small pieces of tape to secure the tracing in place.

After cutting out your permanent template, go on and trace them onto the silhouette paper. What I did was use the back of the silhouette paper and turned my template backwards, so that there would be no pencil marks on the side I would use and the face would be facing the correct way.

Be sure to cut your background paper to fit the specific frame.

Once the silhouettes were cut out, I used a spray adhesive to ensure they would stick properly without the corners peeling up.

Once the pictures were in their frames, I grabbed my staple gun and stapled ribbon to the back of the frames for hanging. (Purple for the girls, blue for the boys).

Final Impression: 
This was one of the most fun crafts I've ever done. I will be doing a lot more silhouette projects in the future. Definitely a project you can work on and come back to when you have a few minutes.