jennanddave.com

Henry's pre-school has a month long hiatus for Christmas. It's a bit of a drag because he's high energy and I'm not good at coming up with ways to wear him out. On Tuesday I came across this post on my friend's website and thought that it looked like it would be a lot of fun to do. She has links to two other sites that have lots of fun crafts and I decided that I would have to make more of an effort to start planning out projects for the days when the weather's bad (ie. all of January and February, and most of March) if we're going to make it through the winter. Some of you may be thinking "Well, duh." but honestly, doing projects and crafts with my kid is not a place my brain goes to naturally. I don't think it is with Dave, either. Sometimes I think it's hilarious we even have kids. Anyway, back to the portraits. I took profile shots of Henry and Holly, traced them out onto contact paper, cut them out with a razor knife, then stuck the cut-out onto a piece of canvas. Initially I asked Henry what colors he wanted to paint his silhouette with, and he said blue and purple. Then he saw the other five colors and decided he would like to try all of them.

Here's a picture of the artist at work:

And here's the final product:

They came out pretty cool. I've saved the cutouts in case we want to do it again on paperboard. I got reusable contact paper per the suggestion of one of the other websites who describes the process, but it didn't stick very well to the weave of the canvas, hence the smudge of blue on Henry's forehead. If we do it again on canvas, I'm going to use the stickier contact paper. And possibly watercolors.