Silhouettes

A silhouette is the image of a person, animal, object or scene. More precisely, it is a monochrome solid shape (usually black), typically presented on a light colored or white background. As a form of artistic expression, the silhouette first appeared in the Greco-Roman culture and Ancient China (the ’shadow theater’), from where it spread to almost the whole of Asia. Silhouette or profile portraiture used to be very popular in Western Europe in the 18th and 19th century.  Such portraits were cheap and easy to make in relation to miniature portraits - within a few minutes, skillful artists would cut them, freehand, from lightweight black cardboard and mount them on a pale (usually white) background. Even today, the silhouette is very popular and can be found in various forms of art such as film, photography, jewelry, graphic design, etc. The vector silhouettes that you can download here have different themes, and they are all precisely drawn in a 2D CAD software and then transformed into vector illustrations. The quality of each of the silhouettes has been achieved through patient work because we do not use the tools for automated tracing of images, which are part of certain vector graphics software. Today, the process of making silhouettes is very easy because you can just import the image of the object into a vector or 2D CAD software and draw it by tracing its contours. On the Internet there are many websites where you can download high-quality old photographs acording to which you can create perfect silhouettes. As with all other categories, all the works published in this one will also be under Creative Commons Attribution licenses, and there will be 2D CAD (.dwg) and vector (.svg and .eps) file formats at your disposal.