Tutorial: Leprechaun Silhouette Art

If you ask my husband, he will tell you that his favorite holiday is St. Patrick’s Day.  With the below-average temperatures that we have been experiencing lately, we will likely stay close to home this St. Patrick’s Day weekend.  So I’m pulling together some Irish-inspired decor to make things a little more festive around here.  I mean, you can’t just let a favorite holiday go by without decorations can you?

I adore Eclectically Vintage’s bunny silhouette, and it inspired me make my own St. Patrick’s Day artwork.  To begin, I pulled out some frames that I bought at a yard sale a couple of summers ago for a quarter a piece.

Isn’t it funny what you sometimes fine when you pull apart old ‘artwork’ from a thrift store or yard sale?  These fruit prints were actually from a 1991 calendar.  I know that I will probably never use them and should throw them away, but I will probably add them to my craft horde for future project opportunities.  Just in case.

To make the actual silhouette, I found a free image that I liked online.  I played around with it a little in my Paint program to attach the head from the online image to some shoulders.  I like shoulders.  Then I printed the image on my home printer and cut it out to use as my template.  This is the black-ish image above.

I traced around the template onto some green card stock.  Then I cut out the image with ordinary scissors.  To cleanly cut out the silhouette, I made sure to keep the traced outline on the outside of my scissors.  You can see some of the leftover outlines on the card stock above.  After I finished cutting out the entire image, I cleaned up any rough edges with my scissors.  See, no fancy machine needed.

I used double-sided tape to attach a piece of scrapbook paper to the back of the mat in the yard sale frame.  Then I flipped the matted paper face-side up and centered the silhouette image.  Marking where the image would be placed, I removed the image and turned it over, so that I could put more double-sided tape on the back.  My secret for getting the double-sided tape right to the edge, so that the silhouette lies completely flat?  I put the tape on the image, so that it hangs over the edge of the silhouette.  When the silhouette is well covered with the tape, I trim the excess tape from the it with my scissors. I taped the silhouette to the matted scrapbook paper, and placed the mat and backer into the frame.

The frame is a little chippy around the edges, and I love it! To celebrate, I poured a couple of coffees. And maybe I did Irish it up a little with some whiskey. Who says you can’t start celebrating St. Patrick’s Day a little early?