It was once a very popular technique. In some cases it still can be. But if you are like the majority of scrapbookers who have been scrapbooking more than five years, you know the silhouetting I am talking about.
Silhouetting in scrapbooking, means taking your photograph and cutting around an object. It works great if it’s a flower that fills the frame, but when it’s a child (which in most cases it was for me), the end result can have an almost creepy effect on the layout.
What I see now when I look back at layouts that I silhouetted photos on, is children coming out of the edge of the page, children sitting on objects with no real dimension, and pieces of bodies missing because the photograph didn’t actually capture it, or I cut too closely to the object.
So if you silhouetted a bazillion photographs back then, what do you do now? Well, of course you can leave as is, as I’ve mentioned before. Kind of for prosperity; a that was then, this is now in the scrapbooking world, sort of thing. Or you can try to fix them.
The best way to fix a silhouette is to simply get the original photograph printed again and place it over the item in question. You might have to re-arrange the page a little to make the photograph fit, but the silhouette will be smaller than the new photograph so it will cover it completely.
You might also just be able to re-arrange the original page a little to make the silhouette work on the page better. For instance, if the child in the silhouette doesn’t have feet because they weren’t in the photo, you might wish to place a box or something over that spot, so it looks like they are standing behind the object.
At least at that point, the silhouette works better. I think the silhouetting phase has gone at last, but if you do decide you’d like to try your hand at it, be sure to do it in moderation. When you crop all those extra things in the photograph out, you are cropping history. You might be cropping the red couch you used to read to your child on every night, or perhaps the old beat up Chevy that you got when you were sixteen. Leaving these in your photographs will evoke wonderful memories when you go back and look at your scrapbook layouts.
Do you have any silhouetting mishap stories or some tips to share? Please share!