Pop Culture Silhouettes

So...pictures from a recent gallery exhibit of papercut silhouettes has been making the rounds of the pop culture/geek websites. It is Papercraft, an amazing collection of pop culture icons rendered in the classical and classy silhouette format. I absolutely went bonkers for this idea, since as you know in our house, I love opportunities for us to express our geeky side, but in a subtle and "classy" way.

Tom's Birthday is today, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to try my hand at the first of what may perhaps be many of these paper crafts I want to make for the house. His favorite movie of all time is a little film made in the 70s called Paper Moon. Tom is an enormous movie buff, but of course his favorite film would be an obscure one with no real fandom to speak of, and very few "collectibles" to give him as gifts. So, I thought, what better gift to make him than a paper craft of Paper Moon?


I started out by screen capping the movie, looking for scenes that had good profiles of the two main characters, Mose and Addie. I lucked out in that there's once scene in the film that provided the *perfect* profile of both of them at the same time.


I reversed the image and tweaked the contrast, and cut out the figures in the foreground, adding a paper moon for easy recognition.


And then it was just a "simple" matter of doing the paper craft one afternoon last week when I was on vacation. It took about 3 or 4 hours all told to do this craft, but I loved the results...it turned out exactly how I wanted it to.


And Tom of course immediately recognized what it was, and loved it. We put it on a wall by our Geek Room / media room, and I hope to add other silhouettes to it very soon. Which characters will be added? Well, I definitely have a few in mind, but that'll be a surprise.

(Tom's also wearing his new Firefly "Fighting Elves" shirt I got him for his birthday)

More gorgeous inspirations from Etsy: