Crafty Friday: Stained Glass Silhouette Collages

Are you ready for some good ol' down home craftin'? I thought so. This craft, though pretty, probably isn't good for the real littles, or cranky 6 year olds, or impatient people. It can probably be easily modified for the littles, or cranky 6 year olds, or impatient people, but as I was impatient dealing with my cranky 6 year old, I didn't figure out an alternative for the littles.

Here's what you need:  

-paper

-magazines

-scissors

-glue

-a simple silhouette to trace

-patience, lots of patience

The first step in this craft is figuring out what silhouette you'd like to use; The simpler, the better. I picked a whale from an old pattern I created for my artwork. Audrie picked an owl sitting on a moon from a silhouette we found online. Once you find your shape, cut it out and lay it on your paper to be traced, like so: 

Then, trace the picture:

The silhouette will be created by filling in the space around the traced picture.

The next step is to pick one color, and start cutting out pieces from magazines in that color family.  For example, I picked orange, so I cut out every shade of orange I could find.  The idea is to get a variety of shades and textures for your picture. 

Once you get your pieces cut out, go ahead and cut out more. Then, when you're done cutting out more pieces, go ahead and cut out even more. It takes a lot.

Then, when you're finished destroying your magazines, you can start gluing. Cover every bit of exposed paper surrounding your traced shape, leaving the silhouette itself white.

Here's where you'll be thanking the stars that you chose a simple silhouette, or, if you decided to add details like water droplets spraying up from a whale, here's the point where you start cursing.

After several days, with magazine pieces glued to your hands, face, and clothes, having lost all sanity, you'll glue the final few pieces on and then break down and cry out of sheer joy and exhaustion. And you'll end up with a pretty picture.

[I went ahead and added some blue so the whale could have an ocean to swim on.]

Now, Audrie took a slightly different approach to her silhouette which can be more time consuming and require more patience, hence why I didn't attempt this method. She made her picture look more like a stained glass window by leaving white space between each magazine piece, like so:

And here's her finished piece:

She got really fancy and used trees and clouds with her picture. I don't know why she always has to upstage me and do something infinitely cooler. Show-off.

I'm thinking if I ever muster up the patience again [which I probably won't], I want to create a set of these pictures and frame them. I love how they look.

Happy Crafting!

xo

nessa dee