Who doesn’t love a silhouette? They stand in place of something and can be nothing or everything. They can be a void to be filled, or a stark reminder of an absence.
I’ve used silhouettes a lot in my designs. I have cat silhouettes:
I have a store on Zazzle that is all silhouettes. It’s called We Have Cookies – a ‘come to the dark side, we have cookies’ reference. I even used a silhouette on my book cover:
There are a lot of places to get silhouettes online, but you can make them yourself. I took a picture of some birds at the top of a tree. Luckily, the lighting was perfect. All I had to do was turn up the contrast and – boom! – a silhouette.
If you have any object or person with a light background, it can easily be a silhouette with some contrast and maybe a little cleaning up. Use it as is, or fill it. You’ll need layers to fill it. With the silhouette on one layer, pick an image or design you want to fill it with. Put that as a bottom layer. Go to the silhouette layer and select the area and delete. The lower layer shows through, and you have a filled silhouette.
If you want the result to stand alone – png with a transparent background – with the silhouette area selected, go to the fill layer and copy and paste as a new image.
Silhouettes are fun and easy to use. They’re very, very versatile. Give them a try!