Silhouette Style Portraits

Personal portraits are a great way of enhancing room décor with your own individual style. There are various ways of creating designer portraits, and silhouette styled portraits are a stylish way of doing so. These portraits highlight the basic outline of the person rather than facial details, giving way to an unusual style of art.

Traditional silhouette style

The silhouette style of portraiture has been popular since many ages, with this style being predominant on Roman era coinage. At that time, images were usually cut out of a black card, a method that is still followed prominently. Other ways of creating silhouettes including painting on mediums, or on reverse in glass, hollow-cutting of images out of the medium and pasting them. The form was also seen frequently in the mid 18th century, though the term silhouette was not employed. Pictures at that time would comprise the basic outline of the person, filled in with black colour. The form lost its popular stance during the invention years of the camera, and came back to popularity only with advertising campaigns and pop art.

Emergence of new era silhouettes

One advertising campaign that really brought silhouette images to life was that of Apple iPod. The advertisements featured popular rock start Eminem and other models in silhouette style. Only the iPods were made visible in the campaign. Soon after the campaign, various pop artists, inspired from the advertisement and previous versions of silhouette art, started creating versions. The style of creating silhouettes also evolved from being simply a cut and paste job to a photo-development technology. Advent of the digital cameras made technologies much more accessible to people.

Silhouette style pop art

All these efforts over the years have today resulted in a new, fresh and interesting form of silhouette art. Today this pop art is available in various ways. Single bright coloured backgrounds often feature a black silhouette or vice versa. Various artists love to play with silhouette colour combinations, resulting in amazing styles that are great for home décor. Various versions of the style are also made available. One of these is the detailed silhouette style, where facial features are made more obvious in the portrait, giving the resemblance of dim lighting conditions. Unlike ordinary digital photographs, pop art silhouettes combine the artistic intellect with new age technologies, creating an amazing amalgamation of style and structure.

Unlike common misconception that silhouettes do not give a clear image of the person, various researchers opinions differ. In fact, it is possible to note the gender, age and facial features of the person from the silhouette alone. Experts also state, that this form of art is great for visual media like photographs, movies, theater and also graphic design. Few online studios today offer a range of silhouette art portraits made to suit the needs of our customers. Silhouettes are thus created in stark colour combinations and also with detailed pictures to show features. Also, these can be printed not just on canvas, but on a range of different mediums like wood, cloth, metal and even natural slate.