Easy Silhouette DIY

Check out my "new" little corner of our family room. It got a facelift with a new chair and a couple of silhouettes. I purchased the chair on a whim (okay, I deliberated over it for days, with it in my virtual cart, waiting for it to go on sale) and am in love with it! I also got around to making silhouettes of my children. I've had it on the list of things I wanted to do. I actually had big plans of creating something like this, but I decided to take the easy (right now) way out and use Photoshop.

Here's my cheater's version to get from picture to silhouette:

1. Take a profile shot of your subject. This will work best if you set them up in front of a solid, light-colored background. My make-it-work trick for my 2 year old was to stick a piece of painter's tape at eye level and tell my him to stare at it. If the angle didn't look right, I just adjusted the tape.

2. Convert your picture to black and white. I used Elements so my instructions are based on this program, but I'm sure you could modify it to work with others.

3. Adjust the brightness/contrast by increasing both.

4. Select the background using the magic wand tool. Fill it with white (or whatever color you'd like). With the background still selected, choose "inverse" from the select drop down menu. Fill it with black (or whatever color).

5. Smooth out the edges. I just did this with the polygonal lasso tool and deleting, and filling the odd areas. I'm sure there are many ways to get this done, but this was the quickest and easiest route for me.

6. Resize or crop and print.

You could also play around with different colors and patterns.

And here's my finished product. I'm happy with them and am thinking that they'll do for now, until I get a bit more ambitious:

I'm happy to answer any questions, if my instructions were not so clear. Have fun!