Playing Art Class

This long weekend was my time to pull out that pack of canvases I bought on sale at Michael's and just play. Most of my ideas have come from Pintrest (surprise, surprise!), combined with some methods my dad uses when he paints. I wanted to make some art for our bedroom, and maybe just use stuff I had and see what I can come up with.

I wanted a gray and yellow scheme for the bedroom, so we painted the walls gray and the plan would typically be to use yellow accents and decor, BUT we have a lovely walk in closet and I thought, wouldn't it be fun to paint the closet yellow. While we were at Lowes I found a gallon of BRIGHT yellow on the mess up shelf for $5... I figure not many people are going to see it, so if it looks goofy, who cares. We had tons of the paint left over (gray and yellow) so I filled tiny Tupperware with both colors to use for my art. And I also have the tan, blue, and green paint left over from the mobile project for baby Logan's nursery.

Attempt on canvas #1 was based on the chevron patterns that are ALL OVER Pintrest. There's so many that there isn't even a picture to share with you. Initially the plan was yellow chevron pattern on the while canvas. So with my ocd I started with the canvas, and pencil, and a ruler. I measured how many rows I wanted vertically, based mostly on the length of the canvas so it would end up even, and drew lines with the ruler. Then I measured across and marked where I wanted the tops and bottoms of my points to be and made marks everywhere on the canvas. By the end, it looked like this:

Then I took what I've seen my dad do a MILLION times when he does his artwork, I cut up masking tape and started filling in the lines.

then filled in the lines with yellow

I took care of a second coat then used a trick I stole from Young House Love (.com of course!) and pulled the tape off before it was completely dry to help keep smooth edges. While the lines looked great, I could NOT get rid of the pencil lines no matter how hard I erased... uuuggghhhh! So it turned from yellow and white, to yellow and gray. Normally I would have painted the whole thing yellow first, THEN taped and painted gray over top, but this meant that I had to RE-tape over the yellow and fill in the lines with gray.

After meticulously lining tape up with the edges of the yellow, painting, and pulling the tape up, I ended up with my first piece of artwork for the bedroom- TAADAAAA

Attempt #2 was based on pictures like this found on Pintrest

patern tutorialoriginally from here, love hearts available for purchase here


What I've read was to use wooden letters or puffy paint. I didn't feel like going to the craft store and figured I could get the same look from Elmer's glue, which I could just pick up at the Walgreens. It started out pretty good- customized with our initials and our wedding date

What I found is that Elmer's glue does a FABULOUS job for what it's supposed to do, it dries pretty flat. Good for gluing paper, sucky for trying to make canvas artwork. So after it dried I applied a second coat of glue, and when that dried, a third. And when that dried, it finally looked raised enough to paint on and show up.

Then I painted the whooooole thing. I thought yellow might be too much for the whole canvas to be, so gray it was

I know the picture doesn't do it much justice. There isn't enough contrast to pick up with my plain 'ole camera, though that's kind of the point of the whole painting. It looks alright, but my three layers of glue gave it some wavey lines and weird places where it's half raised/half flat. If I did it again I would use puffy paint the first time (and/or try the method that the first Pintrest photo actually explains... check out her blog for more info), and work on a steadier hand. I don't know that I'll end up even putting this one up, but I'm glad I tried it and messed up so I know what to do better next time.

Attempt #3 was my BEST YET! Another gift for the baby Logan nursery... mostly because I already have the colors and little 'L' has an initial I can make out of tape. And tape I did! First I eyeballed and made and L out of my masking tape. Then painted over the whole thing in tan

Once that was dry, I eyeballed where I wanted lines of one color (I ended up doing blue first). I knew I didn't want even lines- distance between lines, size of lines- so when I say I eyeballed, that is exactly what I did. I took pieces of tape and taped them across the canvas, and painted between some of the pieces. Two coats of blue went on, pulled the tape up (careful not to pull the L up with it) then when that was dry, I eyeballed more lines, and put on two coats of green. Here's a picture of me in the process of painting the green lines

You can see some of the blue lines poking through, but most of them were covered with the tape for the green lines.

I pulled the tape up, again watching the L, and waiting till that was completely dry. Once the whole thing was set, I pulled up the L I was left with this little gem

There's some things I don't really like about it, some unclean lines, and I think the little nub at the top of the L looks a little funny when everything else is so thick. But generally speaking, for eyeballing everything and just trying stuff out, I'm REALLY REALLY happy with it. I sent a picture of it to Logan's mommy and she said she loved it... we'll see if it actually ends up on a wall :-)

Not much need for a price break down but I can tell you that I got 7 12x12 canvases on sale for about $13 at Michael's (and if I had thought about it, I probably could have found a 20% off coupon). All the paint I already owned, AND since I used my wall paint, I'm sure my art will actually match my room now!

Woohoo... cheap art!