WCYDW at Flying Unicorn - Make Your Own Silhouettes

Welcome to What Can You Do Wednesday! This week I'm bringing you a short, easy tutorial on how to make your own silhouette masks for your art journaling.

Start by cutting images out of a magazine.

I selected these two images from a Stella Artois ad.  The man had long flowing hair and a protruding ear - I trimmed these off as his silhouette would look like an amorphous blob otherwise.

To give the silhouettes more structure I mounted them onto scrap cardstock. I Mod-Podged overtop of the images to give them a little more resiliency so that I can keep them for later use.  For a one-time-use silhouette you can skip this step.

Once the Mod-Podged is completely dry, cut the silhouettes out and place them where you'd like on your background.

I forgot to photograph the next steps (sorry!, I got caught up in the creative process LOL), but I added some music notes I'd handcut from cardstock and then painted over the lot with black gesso. With my masks still in place, I stamped over the background in white ink.

Using the positive stencil left when i cut out the silhouettes, I masked off the black areas and applied yellow acrylic paint through a Crafter's Workshop stencil to add some additional definition to my silhouettes.

Using a Stabilo Aquarabelle white pencil I outlined the silhouettes to give them more definition.

And here is the completed project:

I hope you'll give this a try. Alternately, if you like the look of silhouettes but do not want to make your own, Crafter's Workshop has a selection of silhouette masks (each pack contains the positive and negative image) which are available in the Flying Unicorn Store.

Supplies:

Gesso: White and Black
Dylusions Sprays: London Blue and Postbox Red
Prima Mask: Poppies and Peonies
Crafter's Workshop: Mini Art Is
Yellow Acrylic Paint
Tim Holtz Tissue Tape: Symphony
Prima Brick stamp
Mix'd Media Inx: Jasmine
Stabilo Aquarellable: White