make: animal silhouettes

We currently rent a condo in Portland and because I know we won't be here, but a few more months I find it incredibly hard to want to spend much money on decor.  We are hoping to buy our first home this spring and without knowing what it will look like and with having a strong desire for simplicity, I've been finding ways to keep this place feeling like us without breaking the bank- or being wasteful.

I wanted to find an elk or deer silhouette print for the holidays and turned to google to search for free stock photos.  From there I actually ended up finding two prints I liked and originally planned on printing them out and then getting a draft copy to have huge prints in our home on the cheap.  However, a very cold day kept me in and I decided to bust out my trusty gold marker to try a different idea and actually loved it so I'm sharing with you this insanely easy & affordable print project that you can use in a variety of ways.

I'm a huge fan of foiled art and decided to try making a faux version with the gold marker.  This project really only requires a few supplies.  First find some free stock photos that you want to make your prints out of.  I used this & this.  Next print this to the size you desire, I used standard cardstock and printed in a gray tone so they would be easy to color over with my pens.  Now just start filling in the silhouette- I used a gold sharpie marker, but you can use any color pen or even metallic paint pens to get the job done.  After that you will trace the outer lines to really make your print pop.

Yep, easy as that! As you can see, the gold gave them a richer more foiled look.  I could totally see these being sold as prints at a store and would probably purchase them if I saw them before making this project myself.  As for other alternatives- try this with words or someones name, do a different design or even smaller scale like for gift tags!  The possibilities are pretty endless.  I spent more time looking for stock photo designs than I did on coloring over them, so the entire project isn't too time consuming.  Have fun!

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