What I call lazy

Don't worry, this post is not about you. It's about me. But it's lazy in a good way.

I'm gonna try something a little different this post. I'll start with the finished product.

Cute, right? It's my husband and I in silhouette form. In April of 2009, I got the idea to make silhouettes for all three of us. I was working at a portrait studio at the time and was having our family pictures taken. My boss was taking them for us and I told him that I wanted him to take a profile shot of each of us for me to use. I then used the pen tool in Photoshop to outline our features and made some cool artwork for the wall.

Here they are framed in one of our old houses.

They have prominently hung in each home since then. Here at this house, they greet you at the front door. I love the colors I chose. Green and teal for me, pink and green for my daughter, and orange and navy blue for the hubby. (He's a Chicago Bears fan)

So knowing that I would most likely like to use them again, I saved the silhouettes in a .psd file so that I could still have the layers to play with later.

So on to the project at hand. The frame was found at Goodwill for $1.99. Where else? I bought quite a few things that day....lol.

So I knew I wanted to add scrapbooking paper as the background, and that I wanted our silhouettes facing each other. But what I also knew was that I DID NOT want to cut them out by hand!! Uh uh..no way. Remember the lazy part? Yep! I also didn't want to chance messing something up by printing on the scrapbooking paper. And just then...a lightbulb moment. What about printing on a transparency? That would work right?

I was hoping that I would get a glare to show the transparency, but of course it came out crystal clear. I added the red outline in Photoshop just to show the edges.

Using the glass from the frame, I cut the paper and transparency to fit. Once the frame was reassembled, you couldn't even tell the transparency was there! Just one more small project that worked out in my favor. Meaning that I didn't spend a lot of money, or time...and it turned out right the very first time.

The only draw back of this project is that I wouldn't be able to use the transparency idea very well with frames larger than 8x10, since they are printed on 8.5" x11" sheets. Ahh well....hakuna matata.