Another Twist on Silhouettes

Last year for our Groundhog/Shadow theme, we made Silhouettes with a Twist. Instead of a black head and colored background, the kids had a very colorful silhouette with a black background. I loved it, but I wanted to do something different this year. Here's what we did:

I got the idea for the "halo" look from Housing A Forest, but we did things differently. (Mainly because it had been so long since I read the post that I forgot how they did it.) First I traced the kids' heads onto pink construction paper. This was a little tricky, as they move and giggle quite a bit! Then I cut out all the heads before we started the project. At the art table, I used that sticky blue gooey stuff for hanging things on walls to attach the head to a piece of white paper. Then the kids used oil pastels to make lines from the pink paper to the white paper, all around their head.

They could use one color or several colors. I told them to keep the lines close together so there wouldn't be any huge spots of white.

Then they used a tissue to smear the oil pastels, again starting on the pink paper and moving to the white.

The smearing actually worked better when the kids drew their lines lightly, instead of pressing really hard. When all the smearing was done, I removed the pink paper.

I kind of wish I gave all the girls ponytails or something so they wouldn't look so bald, but they all turned out very cool, in my opinion.

 

I might use this technique again for other things. It was pretty easy for the kids to do by themselves. A few of the younger ones had trouble smearing with a tissue, but they eventually got the hang of it.