Make a Silhouette of Baby

Learn how to make a silhouette of baby with this extremely simple tutorial! No crazy cutting skills or perfect babies (who stay still) required!

I have wanted to make a silhouette of my baby daughter since she was tiny but it is not so easy to get a baby to hold their head just so for a profile shot. I tried to take pictures of her shadow along with about ten other methods to try to create a silhouette.

I personally had only seen a silhouette created at Disneyland when I was little kid and wasn’t about to attempt what that artist did. (i.e. The artist had me sit in a chair, pulled out a black piece of paper, and cut the paper into a silhouette while looking at me.)

Now that my daughter is a toddler, forget it. I’ve taken to drawing sketches of her in my happy journal since all of my photos of her are a blur (or better yet, nothing at all, since she runs out of the frame most of the time.)

This DIY tutorial is so incredibly simple. Here are the steps I followed to create it . . .

How to Make a Silhouette of Baby

You will need:

• Digital camera (your phone will work if you can easily upload the photos to your computer to print)
• Image program on your computer (to open the image) + Microsoft Word
• Regular copy paper + printer (black and white is fine)
• Scissors
• Black paint (I used black fabric paint that had a sparkle to it.)
• Watercolor pencils (These last for-ever.)
• Watercolor paper
• Permanent/acid free glue stick
• Black permanent pen (I love these and use them ALL the time!)

I sat my daughter on her favorite chair in our office and turned on a slideshow of our pictures. This usually entertains her for a few minutes, which gave me enough time to take some quick profile shots.

I used my digital camera and took a bunch of photos. The key is to get a true profile shot so the nose and lips are well defined. You can add in the eyelashes later (as I did) so don’t worry about those.

After the photo shoot, I released my munchkin and got to work on the images. That is probably an overstatement. I chose one picture that captured her profile perfectly and downloaded it to my computer.

I opened that image and printed it. You might need to resize your image or copy/paste it into Microsoft Word to make sure it isn’t absolutely huge.

After printing, I cut her profile out and flipped it over. I used black twinkly fabric paint to paint the back of the image because I didn’t want to pull out the acrylics, and this worked beautifully. The paint took about 20 minutes to dry and the image did curl at the edges but once it was dry, I pressed it under a book to flatten it.

While the paint was drying, I pulled out my watercolor paper. I drew some circles with my watercolor pencils and added just a touch of water to make the circles blurry. Once the design was dry, I glued the silhouette onto the watercolor paper and framed it. I also added her eyelashes in with a black pen since it was easier to add them at the end rather than carefully cut them out.

Honestly, this was such a fun and quick project. A framed silhouette of your child (or children) would make an easy, not to mention thrifty, present for Nana for Christmas. For now, I’m being selfish and have our munchkin’s silhouette in our room. Too cute!

Have a lovely {and creative} day!