Silhouette stencils

Every since I saw this post over at Awkward and Beautiful I've been wanting to make simple silhouette stencils.  Natalie cuts a figure out of a magazine page and uses the leftover page as the stencil.  I wanted something a little more permanent, so I used transparency film.

I laid the transparency over a picture of a person, traced the outline of the image with a sharpie, and used an x-acto knife to cut out the figure.  I put my new stencil on top of an old collage and used black gesso to create the silhouette, like so...

The person I was tracing had her hands on her hips and it wasn't until I was almost done cutting that I wouldn't be able to show the space between the arms and the body in my stencil.  Doh!  It kind of looks like she's wearing a poncho.

Of course I also saved the cut-out piece so that I could use it as a mask.   I placed it over some painted text,  spritzed the whole page with black spray ink and lifted the mask off.  I should have taped it down.  Some ink seeped under the legs.

Look!  She has arms!

This next one was a picture of a woman doing yoga.  The full stencil shows her legs in a lunge position, but it didn't fit over this postcard.  I'm not sure I like it the way it is.  It looks a little too much like an iTunes ad.  Next time I'll use bigger paper so I can see the legs

This next one was a picture of Bill Gates gesturing with his hands.

It kind of cracks me up.

Oy vey!

This one's pretty cool.  The underlying collage had all these gray circles from bubble wrap printing.  After I lifted up the mask I realized the circles kind of line up to suggest boobs and a belly.  

Here's a post card ready to go out in the mail.

Have I mentioned how much I love weekends?