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How to make silhouette artwork.
There was one other part to the Super Pink Barbie Birthday Party that I really wanted to share but just couldn’t fit in my other post. The silhouette portraits! This was my sister-in-law’s brilliant idea (reminiscent of the famous Barbie doll silhouette logo) but got assigned to me since I’m the family graphic artist. I thought I’d put a post up here about them because I think they turned out really cute.
And since I’m putting a post up, I might as well make it a tutorial. Though I’m thinking that if you have photoshop then you probably already know how to use the pen tool and make your own silhouette without my helpful instructions. But whatever. I’ll put it out there because it might be interesting to ten percent of my readers. The rest of you can just look at Bug’s cute profile.
So here’s how you do it:
First take a really nice profile shot of your
victimsubject. It’s helpful if you have a nice clean background behind them so you can see the line of their face clearly. It also helps if you shoot the picture in a room full of light and your subject doesn’t wiggle all over the place causing blurrage.
Then open your photo in photoshop and use the pen tool to create a path around their profile. You can do this with all sorts of tools but I like the pen tool because my favorite program is illustrator and the pen feels most comfortable for me. Do whatever you do, just make a path.
Now at this point you could select the inside of the path and turn it black and then select the inverse (shift-command-i) and turn that white and be done. OR you could be like me and export your paths to illustrator because you like illustrator better and would rather not be mucking around in giant rastor files.
This will put an ai file on your desktop (or wherever you have your default files set to go) and then you can open it in illustrator! Ahhhh, now doesn’t that feel better? Simple paths taking up hardly any memory.
At first you won’t see the path because it’s not selected or colored any color. Just do a select all (command-a) and turn the shape black. Now you can resize your silhouette to fit your frame. Our frames were 5×7 so I put two silhouettes up on one letter-size page. I decided not to print the silhouettes out in black because my mom’s printer was running low on black ink so I printed them out in pink (15% magenta) so I could see the shape clearly but use as little ink as possible.
Now that you have the print-out you can put it on a black piece of paper and cut out the silhouette using the print-out as your pattern. This part is tricky and will require some swift paper-cutting skills around tiny noses and hair tendrils. But you can do it and the end result is rewarding!
Hot pink frame optional.
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SuperChic’s Super Pink Barbie Birthday Party
This past weekend my niece SuperChic turned seven. In true SuperChic fashion she chose a pink Barbie-themed birthday party. I think visiting Barbie’s mansion this past March made a real impression on her. Or she’s just a typical pink-loving girly-foo-foo sort of girl. Which she is.
However my sister-in-law and I are not really typical pink-loving girly-foo-foo sorts so we planned a pink and black vintage-Barbie-inspired party instead. It was a lot of fun. I have to say even I caught the pink fever (again).
My mom sewed her famous flags in pink and black polka-dots (I wish I had a better photo of them) to match the black polka-dot table cloth she already had. There was finger food and pink drinks in fancy plastic flutes that CC found at the last minute. Pink fun-fur (and one blue) boas for everyone and Red-Vines for sippy straws. The divas in the house gave it their seal of approval.
Just kidding Bethany. You are not a diva.
CC made pink S cookies (SuperChic’s real name starts with S) and Bethany baked some impromptu chocolate cupcakes so I could have my Barbie cake toppers stuck in their frosted skirts.
Let me just take a moment to share something about Bethany. I know I’ve mentioned before that all it takes to get her to bake something is to casually mention that you’ve been hankering for this or that sweet. Well, we’ve taken this game to the next level. It’s taken on Dinner Impossible proportions. Now all I have to do is challenge her to any baking task and she’s off banging cookie sheets before I can say, “I was just kidding!”
Seriously, this girl cannot be stopped. So here was this weekend’s feat: I challenged Bethany to bake something in my mother’s teeny-tiny mobile home kitchen. This is no easy task. First imagine the kitchen: It is small. Maybe three feet across and six feet long with a door on one end and one of those impossibly low and stupid dining counters on the other. There is not one speck of counter space. If you want to mix, cut or work on anything you must do it over the sink, the stove or the trash can.
Next imagine an oven that is half the size of a normal oven. It’s about two steps up from an Easy-Bake oven with an inconsistent thermostat to boot. Then imagine that small oven stuffed with about five cookie sheets that are just stored there because there is nowhere else to keep them. That right there is enough to deter me from baking.
Anyway, before I completely hijack my niece’s birthday post with ramblings about my mom’s Mickey-Mouse sized kitchen I would like to present to you this:
It is a vanilla cake. Made from scratch. I like to call it “Trailer Park Cake” even though my mom does not really live in a trailer park. She just lives in a small mobile home on a cul-de-sac on the somewhat nicer side of the sticks. It’s not a bad place, and the neighbors are nice. One of them loaned us baking powder for this cake, in fact.
Anyway, the cake was delicious.
Perfectly moist, not too sweet with a light glaze on top. Bethany is going to be the end of me and my healthy diet. Phooey! But really? How can I not challenge her like this? This nuance in her personality just boggles and amazes me to no end. Next up I’m going to see if she can make brownies over a campfire.
Back to the birthday party. The reason Bethany baked some chocolate cupcakes is because I had my heart set on using these little vintage-inspired Barbie-doll cupcake toppers. As Bethany is to baking, I am to crafting and graphic design. (Though I’m not claiming to be as masterful as Bethany, just as dedicated.)
I think I thought this cupcake-topper idea up long before the Barbie party was even in planning stages and I may have slightly manipulated the whole event around my vision of little paper Barbie bodices stuck into cupcake skirts. So when the party preparation got underway and it looked like the cupcakes were going to fall by the wayside due to time and budget constraints, you can imagine that I was a little crestfallen. And that is why my dear friend Bethany came to the rescue.
Anyway! Contrary to popular belief, this party is not about me. No small children were harmed during my obsession with a party theme being carried out to the smallest detail! This party was about SuperChic turning seven smashingly. I think she had a blast.
We all did
