Nowadays it is no trick at all for the young artist to produce an accurate silhouette of a patient sitter. All the equipment required is a black crayon or pencil, a large sheet of paper, preferably white, and an adjustable bridge lamp with a fairly strong bulb. Place a chair sideways about a foot from the wall and tack the paper to the wall about where the subject's head will be when seated. Turn the bridge lamp arm so that the open end of the shade faces the wall, and have the subject sit with his or her profile to the lamp. Move the lamp until the shadow of the sitter's profile is sharply outlined in the center of the paper, and carefully outline it with pencil or crayon. If an adjustable bridge lamp is not available, take off the shade of a table lamp, place it on a small side table, and adjust its height to the required level by means of books or magazines. After the silhouette has been outlined, it can be filled in with black crayon and the artist's signature written in the right hand corner.

For older portraitists who have envied the casual manner in which summer resort silhouette "artists" snip out small likenesses from black paper, the method of reduction by squares can be applied to the large, real-life silhouette. By "graphing" the latter with parallel vertical and horizontal lines an inch apart and "spotting" the intersection of the crayoned silhouette with any line, there will be little difficulty in connecting up similar dots on an ordinary piece of graph paper. The reduced silhouette can then be cut out, its reverse side blackened with India ink, and the graph side pasted to a piece of white paper.