Floral Deer Silhouette Painting Video Tutorial

This was an especially fun painting. I did it live on YouTube as part of the #PawgustArt (Animal Theme) event that was hosted by the Creative Arts Collaboration group I belong to. This was my first time doing a live stream painting event and it was a lot of fun. I will show links to my full length video and the shorter time lapse one below.

First I found a deer image from the internet and traced it's outline. Notice I did not include the whole neck and I thickened up parts of the antlers and adjusted the ear a little so it was not so close to the antlers.  Then using graphite paper I transferred my outline to my sketch book.

I sketched out the flowers and leaves using the outline of the deer as much as possible. I also incorporated the eye and nose as parts of leaves and flowers. Fit your details inside the outline and fill all the empty spaces if possible without overlapping much.  Then trace out your design leaving out the original outline.  Transfer this to your mat board or other surface with graphite paper (I used white graphite for my dark grey background).

I sealed the Mat Board (just a scrap from a frame shop) with Clear Gesso and lightly sanded it to give it a distressed look. It also protected the background from water and paint drips. I used Golden Fluid Acrylic Titanium White to paint in my details. You could use a white marker or other color paint as well.

Shorter Time Lapse Version

Full length Event Video

Profile Silhouette Collage - Kids Art Project

This is a project I did with my art class back in the fall 2014. I am just now getting around to posting it! This was really fun for the kids.  I think they enjoyed finding images in the magazines as much as anything.  We used canvas panels and mod podge to adhere the pictures, but we could have easily done the whole thing on paper with glue (and I kinda wish we had because the mod podge was pretty messy).

To start with, I took profile photos of the kids the week before and printed them out on a full page sheet.  In class we cut out around the photos leaving a silhouette to use as a template.  I did it this way because we did not have time to try to trace our shadows (and I had a hard time in testing it at home trying to get a good outline that way).  We traced our templates onto a large 12" x 12" scrapbook paper and then onto our 9"x12" canvas panels (making sure to line up the templates in the same place.  Using the outline as a rough guide I had the kids fill in their faces with magazine images and words. They used mod podge to glue the pieces onto the canvas panels (going over the outline so that the edges would be covered). While they worked, I cut out all the silhouettes and trimmed down the scrapbook paper to 9"x12".  To finish they again used mod podge to glue down the scrapbook paper outline of their face which covered up all the rough edges and made a clean silhouette.  We used up all of our 1.5 hour time slot.  The kids were very creative with their image choices.  Some were pretty funny (see BACON).  The photos are a little cloudy because the mod podge was still drying.