Delicious Silhouettes: How to
I couldn’t resist posting these silhouettes from the most recent Martha Stewart Weddings — I love this idea and the wedding looks lovely with lots of attention to detail. The artist here is Karl Johnson, whose amazing work I’ve blogged about before. Some of you have asked how to make your own silhouettes and via the Jane Austen Center:
- Hang a large piece of white paper on the wall of a darkened room.
- Have a person sit in front of the paper.
- Shine a desk lamp at the person to create a defined shadow on the paper.
- Have the sitter turn sideways so that the shadow is a profile. Tell him or her to sit very still.
- Use a pencil to draw an outline of the sitter’s head, neck and the top of his or her shoulders.
- Use a copy machine to reduce the drawing to the size you want.
- Use a glue stick to fasten the copy to a sheet of black paper.
- Cut around the outline.
- Pull the white paper off the black one, flip the black one over and stick it on the front of a blank greeting card or on a sheet of light-colored paper.
What amazes me is that artists like Karl do the silhouettes free hand… Anyway, one of these days I’m going to test this silhouette making out of Tim!
October 2nd, 2007 14:12
This is great- thanks for the how-to!
October 5th, 2007 21:15
I’ve done silhouettes before. It’s not too hard. I photographed the child’s profile, printed it in b&w on regular paper, used a removable adhesive to stick the picture to the black paper and cut out around the picture. Easy peasy! They turned out really good too!
October 10th, 2007 13:23
this is such a great idea! i like the idea of using photographs for drawing out the profiles…