How to Make Silhouette Art

This is a tutorial for making quick and easy silhouette SVGs from your favorite photos for various cutting machine and other art projects.

The possibilities are endless with silhouette art. The real professional artist will probably bawk at my method here but hey, whatever the works and the easiest right?

I made this shadow box from one of our wedding photos using this silhouette outlining technique.

There are making other things you can make from just plain wall art to ornaments to personalized cards.

Suggested Materials for Silhouette Art Projects

Cardstock – I used cardstock from all sorts of sets I already have. Here are some of my favorites:

Shadow Box – I think the black or white framed shadow boxes look really sharp especially if you do a black cut out.

Glue Dot Dispenser – I like this option the most to keep things in place without warping the cardstock. I like the Scotch Adhesive Glue Roller the best.

Frame Templates – I’ve included my set of 3 that you see in the photos for free in my resource library.

How to Create Silhouette Cutouts from Photos

Unless you already use a full graphics editing program like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape, you would normally be left with cutting the physical photo self.

However, I like to use a clever little tool called Clipping Magic to do my work. I actually have both Illustrator and Inkscape but I use Clipping Magic because it is way faster and easier to use.

Clipping Magic is the only fully automated background removal tool that allows you to make editorial changes after the background has been automatically removed.

First, you just upload your image.

It takes a couple of seconds but then it just find the outline for you.

This is where the editing part becomes crucial. So for Silhouette art, you want just an approximate outline so you might want to make some editorial changes. The background removal algorithm is set to find the most accurate.

So here, I want to smooth out the area around the feet.

To do this, I just use the “red” and “green” makers at the top left corner of the screen and tag the areas that I want to keep with green and the areas I want to remove red.