An idea I’ve always wanted to try is to have silhouettes of all of our kids. Maybe I could update them every year as they grow and have a big wall in our home full of silhouettes. If you’re picturing it how I’m picturing it in my mind, it should look pretty neat and spectacular. :)

To make Jack’s silhouette, I took a picture of him from the side. I happened to already have a good shot of his grandpa holding him from the side, so I used that one. I’d recommend having someone else hold him, standing in front of a bright window. You can then either print the photo out and cut around your baby’s face and trace that cutout onto black paper, or do what I did in Photoshop (or a similar program). I simply made my image black and white, and then tweaked the brightness/contrast until I got it where I wanted it. Then I deleted the background and touched up his face with a black paintbrush to make it a solid black. I used the eraser to gently smooth out any funny lines or bumps. Then I placed my image into Illustrator and live traced it. This was surprisingly accurate, and smoothed out every little imperfection. I added a colorful background, typed his name and stats in, and ta-da!

I’m going to frame it (probably in a 5×7) and it’ll go on his wall. He has one blank wall in his nursery that drives me crazy.

I’m not entirely done with the designing process here, but just for this afternoon this is what I’ve got. I still need to tweak the type a bit. His name is a little hard to work with typographically speaking. I think it’s the double J thing he’s got going on.