valentine's art

I wanted to do a cute little paper project in honor of Valentine's Day, and this is what I came up with. It was verrrrrrrrrrrrry cheap. Instead of framing the silhouettes, you could put them on a homemade Valentine card.

Here's what you'll need:

• scissors
• tape or glue 
• three shades of paper
• pen or pencil
• one frame per silhouette
• pictures or clip art to trace

I chose cream, gray and brown for my papers, and I used square white frames.

I found an old picture I took of myself (for another craft project, ironically), and took one of my husband. I put plain white printer paper over the images and traced them.

One I had traced the images, I cut out the paper. The important thing is to pick apart the different elements, and cut them out individually. For example, I cut out my husbands hair and his face/neck separately. For my silhouette, my face was one piece, my hair was another, and my headband was a third.

Trace the newly cut sections onto the card stock or colored paper you chose. Here is my tracing of the face. I used another color for the hair. See where I drew the line for his jawline? You may want to cut a slit there so that you will be able to see the person's jawline in their silhouette.

Now all you have to do is tape or glue them onto the card stock you're using as the background paper! It's sort of like putting a puzzle together.

I got these frames 3 for $2.50 (that's only 83 cents a frame!) in the little impulse-buy section of Target. I already had all of that paper in my little arts and crafts box, so this new "art" cost a total of $2.50:) Not bad!