Dog Silhouette Pumpkins {tutorial}

J and I have a tradition of painting pumpkins together every October before Halloween. This year, of course, was no different, so last Friday we had a date night where we went out for sushi and then painted pumpkins. Yay!

Here is what I came up with:

Do you recognize those precious silhouettes? That's Heidz and Jin Jin!

It all began with these pictures.

Jini

Heidi

And yes, I did enhance Heidi a bit by adding her tail in, even though in the original image her tail is hidden. *gasp* What kind of dog mother does that make me that I felt the need to alter my girl's already perfect silhouette?! I don't even want to know… She really does have a tail, though. Promise. :)

Also, just want to show off what the husband created - this awesome spider!

Anyway, if you're interested in showing off your own pupster(s), then just follow these simple steps.

First, you need to erase the background of the picture. I used Gimp, the free photo editing program, for Heidi's picture, and then for whatever reason, I used the photo editing program (Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo) that came with my computer for Jini's.

In whatever editing program you use, just look for the eraser button in a pop-out task bar or in the task bar at the top of the screen. This process is sort of time consuming and can be frustrating, but after you get the hang of it, it goes pretty smoothly.

Tip: Make sure to only erase a small amount alongside the dog between mouse clicks. If this doesn’t make sense, just try it out and you'll know what I mean. It has to do with giving yourself some room for error, because when you make a mistake, you will have to press the undo button on the task bar - the more background you erased in between mouse clicks, the more work you will have to redo after a mistake. See where I'm going with this? :)

**As a side note, I just want to mention that the next two steps are not necessary for this project. I only did this because I plan to use the girls' silhouettes in another project. I am showing you here in case you want to do something else with your dog's silhouette, too. **

In Gimp, go to Colors. A drop-down menu will come up - go to Desaturate to change the photo from color to grayscale.

Next, go back to Colors on the task bar at the top. From the drop-down menu, go to Levels to darken the silhouette. Adjust the output and input levels until you get your desired shade of black/gray.

Print the photo and cut out the image.

Place the photo on the pumpkin, and trace around the edges. If you spray paint your pumpkin first like I did with leftover White Krylon Fusion spray paint, you won't really be able to write on the pumpkin with pencil or pen - rather, you simply remove the paint while tracing, so you will be left with something like this.

Next, just fill in the image with acrylic paint, and voila!

You now have a cute silhouette of your furry baby!

The other things I did to get this look were paint the stem with black acrylic paint, paint loosely formed polka dots in a bright color, and wind some matching yarn around the base of the stem. That's it!

Another great thing about this project is that it only cost 5 bucks a pop, and all of that went to these massive pumpkins. The rest of the materials I already had.

Suh-weet! Thanks for checking out my pumpkins!


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