Monster Window Silhouettes

This craft is a little late for Halloween, but it took a little longer than I expected to get it all together. I’m still super happy with how it came out, and it’s never too early to plan for next time, right?

This started when I started to see posts and pins all over for window silhouettes. Some were really scary, but I veer towards cute and charming for my Halloween decorations.

After browsing all sorts of images and clip art ideas on the Internet, I came up with a couple of cheery monsters that would lend themselves to big silhouettes. I drew them in Adobe Illustrator, and then after taking measurements of my upstairs windows, I resized them printed them on the large format printer at work on plain paper.

If you don’t have access to a large format printer, Staples or Kinkos can do this for you, or you could tile them out on 8.5 x 11 paper and tape them together. This part doesn’t have to be anywhere near perfect, because it is just the pattern used to cut the final material.

I was lucky to find some unused rolled black paper in the back of the office. If you just don’t happen to work somewhere with these kind of treasures in the trash bin, black posterboard would work just fine.

I taped down my paper pattern onto the black material and cut the outside shape with regular scissors. I slipped my self-healing mat underneath and then cut the eyes and mouth details with an X-acto knife.

I used double stick tape to add a layer of colored tissue paper where the eye and mouth cutouts were so they’d “glow” a different color. And then I double stick taped each monster to a big piece of white tissue paper that was the size of each window. It would probably be easier to use spray adhesive for this part, but Mr. SuzerSpace hates the smell of that, so I didn’t.

I used push pins to mount the tissue paper at the top of my window frames, and then put a small light behind each one at night. It’s hard to see them during the day, which is fine. But at night, the lamps cause the silhouettes to really stand out.

I’m already working (in my mind – that counts, right?) on a Christmas-themed version of this craft.