Saturday 21 August 2010

Moonlight Fairy Art - How You Can Make A Silhouette Fairy

I have been inspired by some beautiful silhouette fairy art that I have seen lately. My husband Robert created some silhouette fairy art a year ago or so, and I've recently seen other artists' versions of silhouette fairy art. I am not very good at drawing, but I wanted to create some fairy art of my own.

So here is what I did, I took a photo of a beautful girl who one of my teenage daughters is friends with in which Robert had already cropped the girl out of the photo and added fairy wings to her when he created this image:

Flutter Fairy


He had saved a lot of the different elements as one piece, so I had a lot of work to do to bring it back to just the girl and the wings. Then I used the "fill" tool in Corel PhotoPaint to turn her into a silhouette.

Of course, then I still needed a background. That's when I realized I had a moon and stars in the night sky graphic that I had created many years ago. It was perfect as the backdrop for my silhouette fairy!

And the resulting silhouette fairy art (which I will be adding to my shop right away) is this:

Moonlight Fairy


If you have a photo editing program and know how to crop something out of a photo, then you can do this too. You just need a pretty background. Maybe a sunset or something full of light and color would work. And then you need a photo of a girl; you will have to crop her out of the photo. Next, if you, like me, are not very skilled at drawing butterfly wings, find a photo of a butterfly and crop it's wings out. Paste the wings onto the fairy at a realistic angle. Then use the "fill" tool in your photo editing program, using the color black, to turn them into a silhouette. Then paste both onto the background photo and you're done!

3 comments:

~ Husitka ~ said...

Very nice. Just be careful when using photos of real people, you should have an agreement from them if you want to use their photos on something you sell. The same goes to any photo you use to create your art ( like the butterfly wings ). My friend knows a lot about this and says everyone working with photos must be very careful to not destroy their business.

Becky Fyfe said...

Thanks for that reminder, Husitka. I always forget that some of this is not common knowledge for people.

~ Husitka ~ said...

Yes, it's not. I, myself, didn't know much about it, or in fact didn't even care about it, until my friend told me something about copyright and how it works ( or should work ). I was really surprised by some of the information because I wouldn't have even thought about some of it. My friend says that unfortunately even a lot of people who sell their art think that they can google images they need, use parts of them for their art without asking the "owners" and think everything's ok with it. :( She also told me about some free photobanks but I can't remember their addresses now. One was MorgueFile or something like that. Yes, it's http://www.morguefile.com/. ( Feel free to delete the link if you don't want it here. )