In today’s world with so much technology at our fingertips, I say use all the help you can get to make your silhouette portraits look perfect. Plus, getting the light set up just right can be a huge pain, and leaves room for distortion and some big mistakes in the final product. I can’t imagine that would work well with small children!

While this method works, it’s pretty hard to achieve since your subject would have to sit still for a long period of time. Several tutorials recommend using the super old fashioned way of just tracing a shadow. There are a bunch of tutorials out there on how to do make silhouette portraits, and a lot of them give some advice that’s not so great.

Just like my Explosion Box project, these silhouette portraits make wonderful, sentimental gifts.

Now that they’re teenagers, I treasure these pieces of art and have them hanging in my living room. They really captured something special about how my children looked at those ages. I first made portrait silhouettes over a decade ago, when my children were just three and five years old. You can find out more information by reading my full disclaimer. Links in this post may be affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you make a purchase from any of them, at no additional cost to you. You’ll want to read the whole post first to get all the important tips and tricks to get this project right the first time! I’m including printable instructions for this project at the bottom of this post, but it’s really just the absolute basics meant to refresh your memory. While I don’t have the talent to freehand a silhouette portrait like those artists did, I do know how to make them myself and make them look just as good, using a few handy cheats along the way. Those silhouette cut outs hung in my granny’s house for years and years, and now over 30 years later, my parents have them hanging in their home. I was fascinated by how she got every detail correct, just by looking at us for a few minutes. I can still remember sitting for one on my very first trip to Disney World.ġ1 year old me was enchanted as I watched the artist skillfully cut out an amazing likeness of myself and my sister from plain black paper. Silhouette portraits are some of the most beautiful and surprisingly some of the easiest crafts I’ve ever made.

How to install icc profile in silhouette