Retirement Gift Part II: Project Manager of the United States of America

I've been inspired. It started a few weeks ago when google landed me on 'iDo'-it-yourself. DIY ideas have been spinning in my head since but, none have left a greater impression than Motif: Silhouettes. So many possibilities!

Here's my first complete rendition of silhouettes. Yet another gift for a retiring colleague. Yes, he will be missed.

Printed on vellum paper (can be purchased from Staples). The smudge spot is his redacted signature. Background paper is white which colleagues will write their farewell message around the silhouette. The idea is not to have the messages overpower the print - thus the vellum. Lets see how it works out tomorrow at the office!

P.S. Creating the silhouette is easy as cake! I've read other blogs that used the approach of tracing paper over a printed photo but if you're a digital gal/guy, all you need is a digital camera or camera phone, computer and image editing tool.

1. Take a digital profile picture of your subject. In our case, we recruited one of the jokesters of the office to pretend he was doing a camera phone photoshoot of the project team. What a great candidate because even after 5 snaps, the jokesters activities went completely unnoticed. Tip: try to have as blank of a background as possible. This will help during the editing process.
2. Using a picture / graphics editing tool (I used Gimp on my mac), do your very best to capture the outline of your subject. I did this with a little tinkering of decreasing brightness, increasing contrast, desaturating, erasing noisy backgrounds, etc.
3. Fill the outline with black if you haven't already.
4. Erase the background if you haven't already.
5. Have another go at decreasing brightness and increasing contrast until your silhouette is completely black.

Tada! A silhouette!