One of my favorite projects I’ve done with the kids was our watercolor silhouettes.

We started out in a dark room with white 8×11″ card stock, a pencil, and a flashlight.

The person whose profile I was tracing stood in front of blank wall (or in our case, a door) while the other person was about ten feet back from them holding the flashlight. You can use painter’s tape to hold the paper up while you trace.

I had my six year old at the time hold the flashlight. If I had it to do over again, I might have rigged some kind of tripod up to hold the flashlight, as there were a lot of moving parts between the flashlight and the subject! A benefit to having an actual person hold the flashlight is that they can move forward or back to help get the outline on the paper to be crisp, and the right size. I recognize that this is super low tech, but it was part of the fun of the project for us.

I traced the outline – the important thing is not perfection, but to get the essence of the person.

After I had the outline for each kid, I used a sharpie to trace the parts of it I wanted to keep, and got rid of the pencil lines. I scanned the outlines onto the computer so that if things went south, we could just print out a replacement for anyone who needed one, and also for posterity.

Once we had all the silhouettes ready, we pulled out our special watercolor paints. We used Colorations Liquid Watercolor, which I found online at a teaching supplies store. We did this project three years ago, and I still have some – we use it for special projects only. I have the 8 oz. bottles, but they have decent prices on 4 oz. bottles that come in sets. One project doesn’t use much paint, and they blend beautifully, so if you’re looking for good results with a low skill level (read: kids), this is a great way to go.

Each child painted their own profile, except the baby’s, which I did. I had to watch the smallest ones closely because of their tendency to scrub the paint into the paper until it had holes in it. Once they had gotten enough paint on theirs, I whisked them away and gave them fresh paper to do a second painting while the older kids took their time.

After the paintings dried, I used Mod Podge to glue them to foam board. I cut the two youngest kids’ profiles down a little to make all six fit on the foam board I found. That allowed me to put the faces together without all the seams lining up. It also forced me to go out of birth order, which varied the sizes of the profiles rather than them diminishing in size from top to bottom.

I weighed it down with heavy books to keep the corners from curling up. The entire foam board still bowed a little, and the individual paintings buckled a little in places. Initially, this broke my heart, but I hardly ever notice it now.

I used my box cutter and and a ruler to cut off the excess foam board after the glue had dried. I colored the exposed edges of the foam board with the sharpie to give our artwork more depth.

Two things I would change about how I did this: Make sure the finished size was a standard frame size, and experiment with glues first to see if there was something I could use that would have prevented the paintings from buckling. As it was, I ended up with an amazing piece of art in an irregular size – I found the floating frame above on clearance months after we finished the project.

My kids enjoyed this project so much that we ended up printing off more of their scanned profiles so they could paint them again. None of them were as amazing as the first batch.