Thursday, October 11, 2012

Halloween Silhouette Project!!

I know, I know, I'm a terrible blogger. To be honest I have no energy for such things since Layla has started school. Our lives are so busy & she only goes half days! I can't even imagine next year when she goes full time.

Well, it's October & we've had our Halloween decorations out for a while now. I was just really excited & started to slowly put stuff up in September. The past TWO Halloweens we have been in the process of moving so all of my lovely Halloween decorations were boxed up & we couldn't enjoy them. So this year I was just so excited, which is why I couldn't wait to start!!

My mom just sent me a bunch of old picture frames that belonged to my grandma & I had a couple ideas of what I could do with them. Having just received them in October I of course had Halloween on the brain & decided to do something gothic with them.


They're really great frames, but gold just isn't my thing so I had to pick another colour to paint them. Sticking with the Halloween/gothic theme I decided to go with black.


I thought of maybe doing the distressed look, which would be pretty neat for the gothic look, but I'm too impatient to wait for all those layers of paint to dry & then distress it. So if that's what you want to do, then go for it. I think it looks great either way.

Then I had to draw the silhouettes to go in the frames. You can probably print some & cut them out, but since I was feeling lazy & didn't want to go all the way upstairs (OMG! so far away!) to use the printer, I free-handed the silhouettes. I did look up pictures on my laptop to base my drawings on. I found some really cute ones to copy.


To make cutting out the silhouettes easy I used an exacto knife. The frames are pretty small so I needed to make sure the details on the silhouettes were cut cleanly. I also traced the outline of the part of the frame that the silhouette would actually be showing through. Use the actual frame, because if you use the glass you might make the silhouette too big & it might get cut off.

Then I picked out a background paper and cut it to fit each frame. I decided to go with pages out of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies!



Awesome, right?! Perfect for my Halloween silhouettes!!

Next I needed to pick out the paper for the actual silhouettes. I really didn't want to do all black because the frames were pure black. Luckily I had a dark scrapbook page that wasn't too dark & had just enough detail on it to give the silhouette some depth, but not too much detail to take away from the actual silhouette.


Once I had the silhouettes cut out on my pretty, gothic paper I places them on the book pages I had cut out & put them in the frames once they were dry. I think they turned out wonderfully!!


I had to throw in some that just screamed HALLOWEEN at you. I love the feminine little witch & Frankenstein's bride!!





Finished all 5 & now have them set up with some other Halloween decorations I made myself years ago! I think they look great with my pumpkins!



Happy Halloween all!

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