Sick Day Silhouettes

We have been sick all week. It started last Tuesday with Oliver starting to cough on the ride home from Karate. By evening he was looking like one sick puppy. Then Andrew got boogery and feverish, too. By Friday Elliot and I had both caught it, too. Remarkably Ryan has thus far been spared. I feel better now but not 100%. Anyway, on Thursday, before we were all entirely down for the count but all home "sick" from school, we did this art project that I thought came out pretty well.

I've been doing a lot of experimenting with silhouettes (like old fashioned cameos) because we are making cameos of all the kids in Oliver's Kindergarten class for the school auction. I am the "Art Awareness" coordinator in his classroom this year. It is a lot of fun to plan lessons...less so to see them go wildly off the rails in the classroom. It's just tough when there are 32 kids, even when there is a lot of help from other parent volunteers. The level of fine motor skill varies so much at this age so what is relatively easy and straightforward for some kids is just overwhelming for others. So far, I have not had a lesson where I didn't leave feeling totally exhausted and like I should have made it MUCH simpler.

Anyway, so the basic way of making these cameos is that you take a photo of the child in profile against a white background (a white wall, for instance). Bump the contrast in whatever photo-editing tool you have (I used Picassa) until the kid-shape is completely black and the wall is white.  You can then print out the photo onto cardstock and cut it out. You can paint over the card stock which is what I plan to do with the Kindergarten silhouettes, but I wanted to try something else with the boys. I printed out their profile photos and traced it onto contact paper. I put the contact paper silhouettes on small canvases and let them got at them Jackson Pollock-style. When the paint dried we peeled off the contact paper and, voila! impressive likenesses of my little guys.

(No Oliver is not brushing his teeth, I thought the toothbrush might make a cool fine mist-type spray if we tried flicking it with our fingers. It didn't really work, though. Meh...it was worth a try.)

There is some bleeding of the paint under the contact paper. I tried to make sure that there was a good seal, but we thinned out the paint so it would fly and it got under the contact paper anyway. I used some gesso and a small brush to touch it up after I took this last picture.