Family Silhouettes

Since our Christmas Trees came down, I have been really bothered by the emptiness and blandness of the corner where the Christmas tree was. We prefer family pictures instead of artwork but I just didn't know how to get it decorated. Silhouettes are big now and there are alot of different ways that you can get them done (for a price) or ways that you can do it yourself. I even found that there are alot of different DIY ways . So here's what I came up with. My husband was on board the whole time and was really excited when he saw the finished product. So this is the way I did it (and sorry I don't have step by step pictures)

1. Take profile pictures of everyone in your family.
2. Shrink and crop to the size that you want and print them out.
3. Very carefully cut along the profile trying to exact as many of the bumps and curves of the face and hair as you can.
4. Paint the cut outs black. It took me about three coats with regular acrylic paint to get it really black.

And that's it as far as the silhouettes. Next, I wanted to do something different for the frame and matting. The frames I had were shadow frames I got a long time ago. They had a matte that sat right against the glass and a "board" that sat lifted up higher. (I don't know if that makes sense and you can't really tell from the picture). I had some book pages from another project I worked on that I decided to mod podge onto both the matte and the back board. After those were dry, I simply glued, the silhouette with mod podge, and put another coat on top. The whole porject took about 2-3 hours spread over a couple of days (there's only so much you can do during naptime!). Total cost for the project $0! I had everything at home. And yes, I even did one of the dog....little MissyGirl! I am very happy with how they turned out and I think it adds so much to our living room!