After my ceramics kick I was looking up more fun, inexpensive group crafting ideas. I looked at some of those “wine & paint” nights but I don’t have anywhere to hang a reproduction painting that looks like a failed forgery attempt. (My apologies to those artistic enough to make a reproduction Monet). And the paint on wine glass events were too expensive, even on Groupon. (Especially after I saw an article on pinterest about how to make them in your own oven, wonder if this works…)
During the spring I was talking to the owner of our “doggie daycare” and she showed me photos of a “wine & paint” night where the artist guides you through creating a picture of your dog! To me that seemed better than the Monet forgery, but still requires some serious artistic talent. Eventually I stumbled upon what I was looking for – dog silhouettes. What a great idea, and this blog has fabulous steps. There are a few clarifications I’ll add below, but with her instructions I held a “wine and paint” night where everyone successfully created a silhouette of their pet! This project was such a success I even created one for my friend to use as the guest book at her wedding. Here were the final results (bonus points for spotting my little fluffy butt dog):
Some tips we found useful:
- I had everyone email me pictures of their pets a couple days beforehand so I could blow them up on Picassa and print them out on the sticker sheets. To save ink I used paint to remove most of the background of the pictures then printed in black and white.
- Another issue we had is that the Picassa poster resizing with your print margins is not obvious to use. You have to double check that the entire cat/dog/pet will fit in the picture before you print it. We ended up cutting off a couple tails and ears the first time around.
- Most of the work for the project is cutting out pictures of your dog or cat. We did this while drinking wine and eating appetizers. It is not necessary to cut out all the tiny details of your dog or cat, just big chunky spots of fluff are going to be the best bet. More minute details will be lost in spray paint.
- The contact paper was not sticky enough by itself to prevent the spray paint from seeping under. It could have been the brand I used, but I ended up instead lightly spraying the back of the contact paper with 3m adhesive to get it to stick properly. Luckily I had this removable adhesive leftover from my bee stenciling. The adhesive worked really well.
- Have tweezers and disposable gloves ready so you can easily remove the contact paper immediately after spraying. (This is messy business, so I informed guests not to wear fancy clothes and had aprons ready.
- The whole project was incredibly cost effective! I used leftover spray paint I had on hand (or had guests bring a color if I didn’t have one they liked). The 16×20 canvases were less than $2 a piece from Job Lot, sticker paper was $13 for 100 sheets, and 18 inch wide contact paper was $7 for 24 feet. This is a grand total of $6 per person, way cheaper than wine and paint night. Plus minus the canvases I still have half the supplies left…
Here’s the version I made for my friend’s wedding guest book. I provided gold sharpie paint pens for guests to write on it since their colors were cobalt and gold. I’ll have to ask her for the version with all the signatures!
Do it yourself pet silhouette guest book
