OK, it's time for my tutorial! (Bet you didn't think I'd get this up this fast.)
I decided I wanted some new art to hang in my new apartment and luckily I had a few blank canvas in my craft supply that I could paint. I knew I wanted something graphic and modern, so off to Pinterest I went.
What I found was this piece from the blog
younghouselove.com.
I decided this design would work for me. It was colorful, not too distracting, but still had enough interesting details.
I headed to Home Depot to get paint (and a few small items I needed.) Thank you to Christianne for telling me a few projects ago that you can get a little sample of any paint color for $2-3. This will last a WHILE!
I decided I wanted to incorporate some yellows and grays and found three colors I liked. After running a few other errands, I went back to my basement and set to work following the instructions on
the tutorial.
First, I used a pencil and straight edge to mark off the columns.
Then I used the corner of a 3x5 card to randomly section off the lines and create the pattern. I used both inverted and ... what is the opposite of inverted?? ... angles to add more variety.
I started painting and decided I should probably decide what color would go where. So I put a dash of color in each section. And this kinda turned into a color by number project. Except there were no numbers.
For the first round of painting, I didn't focus too much on the lines and being precise.
I missed pictures of a few steps here, but after my first color (light grey) dried, I used painters tape to cover any overlapping sections of colors 1 and 2. I then painted and let dry.
After THAT paint dried, I removed the painter's tape and reapplied (yes, I reuse tape. I'm that cheap.) where the 3rd color would overlap with the others.
I could have been a lot more precise with this process. (I watched two movies while I worked on it...while doing a few other things and waiting for paint to dry.) But I wanted to move things as quickly as possible and undoubtedly cut a few corners.
A look at my setup while waiting for the final layer to dry.
I wanted to have a bigger piece so I actually used two separate canvases and designed them to hang side by side. I would have gone even bigger if I had the materials on hand. Here's one finished and another in the works. I could have done them at the same time, but I wanted to make sure the process worked on Canvas #1 first.
I also used the yellow paint to cover the canvases on the sides. These were previously painted black with lovely swirls some say resembled DNA. :P Here's what they look like on the wall. The lighting is horrible.
Some tips and thoughts:
I used a mechanical pencil for my lines, but it ended up kinda dark, and I had a hard time covering the lead. I would think a soft pencil that was lighter would work better.
I think it would look cool with thicker columns. Mine are just less than an inch because that's the width of the stick I used to measure. I'd love to see it done with 2 to 2.5-inch rows. Plus that means less work!
Again, I would have loved to go even bigger with the canvas size!
