Easy Art

As I mentioned in this post, although I love our cozy TV room, the decor strikes me as a little on the college side of things.  You know, too small art that we bought at the local poster sale...  Sadly, moving the furniture around really highlighted our decor problems.

The biggest problem area is the spot where the couch now sits.  Before, this wall was easy to overlook with our too-cramped furniture lay out.

See not so bad...  With the lamp and dresser the wall decor doesn't look so bad.  At that time I had even thought about adding some really tall something to fill in the space below the middle picture.

But once the couch came to live on this wall...

Yikes...  Clearly with the size of the couch, those sweet little college purchased prints were just not going to work.

I totally loved Sherry's cheap-o idea to use paint chips to create something lovely.  However, I didn't have a big ole basket of paint swatches lying around and I didn't think my local Lowe's would appreciate me grabbing paint swatches just to make some art, so I figured I could paint something.

I started by gathering my supplies- cheap-o canvas, 10 monochromish  paints, a paint brush and some measuring implements.  I measured my canvas into 2 inch squares...

I know those marks a bit hard to see, but I did want to keep my pencil lines on the light side so I would be sure that my paint would cover them.

I didn't want this to look at all patterned, so I just got to work filling in squares...

2 colors down...  You can see on the edges that I went over my lines a bit.  I wanted to be sure that my mat and frame wouldn't show any white spaces on the edge of the canvas, so I eliminated the white space.

Just about 1/2 way done.  You can see that I added some metallic gold.  LOVE.

3/4 of the way done and I've added a bit of metallic bronze.  I was careful to make sure that the gold and bronze squares didn't land next to each other.  That seemed like it may be too much.

FINISHED!  LOVE LOVE LOVE!

And framed.  LOVE LOVE LOVE X 1,000,000

I really am thrilled how this came out.  I don't have the steadiest of hands, so I was concerned about painting outside the lines.  My lines are far from straight, but by moving slow and using a small brush, I did a-okay and I love that it isn't absolutely precise.

All in all, this project ran me about $30, but the frame and mat were $20.  All in all, not bad for some cheap-o art and a fun afternoon of painting.

Tune in next week to find out how it all looks on the wall!