Please note that the student who created the beautiful work above....made one mistake. she drew what she wanted to cut out using white pencil, but then failed to glue that side down. we should never see pencil lines when you cut and glue things down!
let's look at a real silhouette and then understand how it works here is a calm scene at sunrise
by calm, I mean that there is no action. The scene has a relaxing feel to it. This is achieved by a scene that mainly has vertical & horizontal lines in it. .....notice that the sun is on the other side of the dock from our viewpoint. We see details of objects when light bounces off of them back to our eyes. In this case, the light source is on the other side of the dock. so, without light hitting our side, everything looks black..... when we see the backside of items being lit ...we say that they are in silhouette.
now...notice when you do a sunset...it is brightest near the horizon...and then gets darker as you go away from the sun.
as you paint, place horizontal bands of red and yellow near the bottom of your paper, then some orange.....then blue and violet...no green!
notice the lines moving left to right..along the horizon...this is how to remember which way horizontal runs