With VE Day coming up I have been thinking about what we could do and I remembered seeing some soldier silhouette painting ideas last year so I thought we would have a go. I had a quick search and found a soldier template on the Activity Village site. So I printed some out and then we started cutting. Whenever we use templates I always get the kids to trace around the template and not just paint or colour in the actual template. Why? Well years ago I remember an Occupational Therapist telling me all these benefits from getting kids to trace and it just stuck with me, so we always trace around our templates but that is our personal preference.

We painted a few different soldiers and played around with possible colours but we all agreed the black was the most effective.

And for our standard black soldier silhouettes we went for a red/ yellow background and used a bit of black to create a surface on which the soldier was standing.

And our favourite final piece.

While we were playing around with different colours one of my kids did also try a purple background (my one kiddo just thinks purple looks dramatic) and we thought it looked quite effective with a white silhouette (showing you both options below).

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It is a very easy art activity to do with the kids and what I really liked about it is – it is also a great opener to discuss why we remember days like VE day, and what the World Wars meant.

(Also any silhouette art activity is a great activity to discuss how using contrasting colours makes an image stand out.)