Hammerhead Shark Silhouettes: 8 Hammerhead Poses and 12 More Shark Species

The first eight of these twenty shark designs are all hammerheads, each drawn from a different angle, and the other twelve are different shark species. Every design is a black-and-white shape for printing, stenciling or cutting, in a solid version and an outline version.

Eight hammerheads

The wide, flat head reads differently depending on the angle, and these eight cover the main ones:

• Cruising (01): side-on, the classic profile with the tall first dorsal fin.
• Top view (02): looking straight down, so the hammer is a bar across the top and the body tapers to the tail.
• Turning, ascending and diving (03 to 05): the body bends on a diagonal, one heading up and to the right, one nose-down.
• Approaching (06): head-on, with the hammer stretched across the page and the eyes at each end.
• School of three (07): three hammerheads in a line, each one smaller than the last.
• Sweeping arc (08): one shark curving through a C, head at the top and tail swinging out below.

Twelve more sharks

Designs 09 to 20 are single sharks in side or three-quarter view, and each keeps the feature you’d spot it by. The whale shark (10) is covered in spots, the tiger shark (11) has bars down its back, the nurse shark (12) has barbels under its snout, and the blue shark (14) has long, thin pectoral fins. The thresher (16) trails a very long upper tail lobe, the blacktip reef shark (17) has marked fin tips, and the basking shark (20) swims with its huge mouth wide open. The great white, lemon shark, shortfin mako, zebra shark and Port Jackson shark complete the twelve, with the zebra shark covered in pale spots and the Port Jackson banded in dark and light.

Solid blackwork and a bridged outline

They’re built for different jobs. The solid one is a black silhouette with white details carved in: gill slits, the belly line, spots and stripes. Some of those details are separate small pieces, so cutting it may mean weeding them out or assembling them.

The outline is a single line around the outside of the shark, with the eyes, spots and inner details left out. The short breaks in that line aren’t mistakes. Cut the line away from paper and the breaks become bridges that keep the inside of the stencil attached. In the school of three, the sharks are separate from each other, so keep them in place if you want the whole group.

Printing them

Every PDF page carries the design number and name in a small header. A US Letter page with one design puts the shark at about 6.3 inches on its long side, and the four-up and six-up pages shrink it to about 3.1 and 2.6 inches. The vectors sit on a 10 x 10 inch canvas, where the longest side of each design measures about 8.6 inches, and the PNGs are 3000 pixels square at 300 dpi.

The cutting notes recommend a plain-paper test print, scaling up if small details are hard to work, and adult help for children using cutting tools. They also point out that the paths were checked in software only, with no specific machine or material result promised.

Questions

Why does the outline have breaks in the line?

The breaks are on purpose. When you cut the black line out of paper to make a stencil, those gaps stay as paper bridges and hold the middle of the shark in place. The cutting notes ask you to keep them when you resize or edit a design.

Do the outline versions show the spots and stripes?

No. The outline follows the outer edge of each shark and leaves out the spots, stripes and eyes. For the whale shark's spots or the tiger shark's stripes, use the solid version.