How to Make Silhouettes in Pixelmator: A Step-by-Step Guide

In my last post, I discussed how to Make Silhouettes in PowerPoint. Since then, I have been turning more and more images into silhouettes in preparation for a Classroom Game I am working on. I will share with you how I use Pixelmator to make silhouettes. Even if you don’t have Pixelmator, it might be nice to see how it works and how it differs from doing this task in PowerPoint.

5 Steps for Making Silhouettes in Pixelmator

1. Import the image

When you launch Pixelmator, you will be greeted with a welcome window. this window will have your last few projects on the right and three options on the left

Create a new document
this option opens up a new document window where you can choose from many different templates or create your own custom size canvas
Open the photo browser
This option opens your photo library, letting you select an image from there to work on.
Browse files on your Mac.
The browse files option opens a finder window.

For this task, I already have saved the images I want to convert to silhouettes in a folder. Although I could use the Browse file on your Mac option, I prefer to use right-click on an image and then select Open with – Pixelmator Pro from the dropdown menus

2. Remove The Background

With our image now in Pixelmator and ready to be worked on, I first like to remove the background. Pixelmator gives us many ways to do this. Pixelmator has a button at the top of the window that will automatically remove that background. I have found with these cartoon-style images that this function also removes some parts of the image I want to keep, so I am not using it for this project.

Another way to do this could be to use the Quick Selection or Color Selection tools and delete the areas you don’t want. My tool of choice for this is the Smart Eraser.

With this tool selected, click and drag on the background parts you want to remove. It’s not perfect either, and sometimes you will need to clean up a little mess left behind by using the standard Eraser Tool.

3. Select Subject

Now that our image is cleaned up, we need to select it.

1. Quick Selection Button from the side panel
2. Press Select Subject
3. Use Add or Subtract options to make sure everything you want is selected.

4. Convert to Shape

Once you have selected everything you want in your image, right-click on your selection and select the Convert into Shape option from the menu. This will create a new layer.

5. Set Fill Colour

1. Select the new layer
2. Click on the Style button in the side panel
3. Toggle the fill button to on
4. Change the fill colour to black

You can also set the fill colour to a pattern or a gradient.