How do I cut Silhouettes?

- May 20, 2016

Whenever I cut silhouettes at an event people are always asking me how I learned to cut a likeness of a person in under five minutes.

It's hard to answer that in the few minutes I have with the people I do silhouettes of.

So I usually just say that I've been drawing faces my whole life, and when I learned from watching a documentary in 2009, that the art of the silhouette was still sought after, I just went online and looked up the few other silhouette artists still working, and taught myself by looking at their methods.

So with a very sharp pair of scissors( mine, which I got from Walmart and aren't fancy, but are very sharp) and black silhouette paper, (black on one side, white on the other) which I now order from an Etsy shop, I sit in a chair a little ways away from the subject, and cut their silhouette just by looking at their profile. No pre-drawing, no tracing a shadow, no lights.

My figure drawing class in art school was probably the best class I ever took in terms of preparing me for what I do now- cutting silhouettes and drawing caricatures. It's because I learned to use something called sighting, which is a process that artists use when drawing. Sighting is a way of measuring parts of a drawing, one to another; comparing one visual element to another and correcting as you go in order to obtain accuracy.

Learn more about sighting here: