Pinterest Challenge: DIY Silhouette Style Art

I had been hearing about this Pinterest phenomenon all year and finally got my act together and joined during the summer. And once I did, I realised what all the fuss was about.

Pinterest allows you to collect images and links of things that catch your eye across the internet and keep them in one place. It has made my web surfing so much fun, and allows me to easily reference back to images and ideas. You can check out my boards by clicking on the red button on the right (or here).

Part of what finally got me to join in the Pinteresting fun was the Pinterest challenge held earlier this summer, in which some bloggers challenged people to stop just pinning ideas and actually do them. The fall edition of the challenge is going on now, and as I have this blog now, I decided to join in!

The fall edition of the challenge is being hosted by: Young House Love, Bower Power, Ana White and House of Earnest.

The challenge is:

• Pick a pin
• Make it
• Share it via links on the host blogs

Easy! Well easy in theory. The challenge was to pick a pin that I could actually do within the limited time I had available. After all, I was busy hosting friends and spending time on another crafty initiative last week.

After contemplating the many (many) projects I have to do in my place, and the many (many) exciting ideas I have pinned on Pinterest, I settled on one.

Source

The Stella Dallas store was featured on Knight Moves a while ago, and I somehow stumbled across the images. The beautiful bright frames and silhouettes caught my eye, and so I decided to use the challenge to create my own 'inspired by' version. "Inspired by" because my final product doesn't look that much like the idea I pinned.

I needed a piece of art to fill in the gap between my recent antique market find and the Homesense mirror over my sofa.

Excuse the late night shot with large light reflection

I wanted something fairly simple that would complement rather than compete with my large scale art. After much thought, I finally hit upon what my silhouette would be.

A heron. What could fit better with a painting called Lily Pond In Summer?

So, without further ado, here is the finished product.

Before I explain how I did it, I should say that I am not an artist. I never took art classes and in fact have hardly ever held a paint brush unless I'm painting a wall. So even thinking about taking paint to paper was kind of a big deal.

First, I needed to get some art supplies. I picked up a Reeves Acrylic Complete Painting Set. It had acrylic paint colours, brushes, paper, pencils, a palette and more. Basically everything a rank beginner like me could need.

Then I needed a heron. I knew there was no way I could freehand the bird, so I googled for some heron silhouettes and came up with one I liked.

Source

I printed the image out on some fairly heavy card stock, and then used an exacto to cut around it.

Next I just had to trace a pencil outline around it, then finally paint it while trying to stay within the lines.

You could also just paint directly over the image if you were happy using regular printer paper as a backdrop. I was originally planning to paint the image onto a canvas, hence the tracing.

In the end I strayed pretty far from my inspiration image (although the cat did inspire the cut off aspect of the heron). My heron has a fairly heavy painted look, and I added some coloured accents, while the inspiration was more graphic and a single colour.

But all in all, I'm pretty happy with my first attempt at DIY art and think the heron will be thrilled to have landed at such a pretty lily pond.

Photos of the art in place to come soon! First I need to find a white frame for it, and rearrange the three items so they fit together properly.