Laura Vanderbeek: Fun project with vinyl

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I have a lot of blank space on my walls. I don't put stuff on my walls just because it's empty.

We also moved into this house just a few weeks after I finished cancer treatment which included 6 months of chemo and 5 weeks of radiation. So I have been slowly working on my house because I've really been working on the garden - it took us an entire summer to put the sprinkler system into the 1/2 acre yard and up to the garden. Then I've mostly spent the summer planting flowerbeds and the veggie garden. Last summer we added 4 trees for a total of 6. Still need way more. I mostly just work on the inside when it's winter. I painted a mural downstairs in the closet under the stairs which took one winter. And a few months ago I painted the branch on the wall and the leaves and birds.

I was waiting for my Silhouette to cut some vinyl to really give the hall the look I wanted.

Yesterday before school I photographed my daughter inside with backlight from the window so I could create a silhouette.

Then I turned the photo black and white. Next I upped the shadows and the highlights creating the contrasty look you see below. I used a white paintbrush to get rid of all the extra stuff I didn't need. I used the black paintbrush to fill in the hair. I didn't want the Silhouette to have to cut too much detail.

Then I turned it into an SVG file in Adobe Illustrator. In fact while in Adobe Illustrator I used the Live Trace. Then Expanded it and used the Pen tool to remove a few of the anchor points to smooth things out. I have the Designer Edition of the Silhouette software so I can open SVG files that I create in Adobe Illustrator.

Here you can see I pulled it into the software. If you right click on the image you can change the file into a path and then a compound path. I knew my blue vinyl was 9" wide so I didn't enlarge it any bigger than the brown frame I cut from 12" vinyl.

I painted the branch, birds, and leaves a while ago but had to repaint the branch to match the dark brown frame color.

Then I traced the birds and cut them from the 9" vinyl. And I realized my red leaves were not the right red - I want it to match the red in the quote I'll be adding along the bottom. So I traced all of the leaves using left over tissue paper from Christmas packages. I scanned them in and did the same thing as above. I love the red vinyl for the leaves. It's beautiful!

This is my favorite photo because you can see the large wood baseboards near the floor and how it wraps around the corner. And yes, my son's room is painted navy blue but the wood work that is 3 feet tall is a light tan color.