Rustic Wall Art - Part 2

I know this post is late getting out but this project took longer than anticipated! I hope everyone had a great weekend and wonderful Monday! (As good as Monday's get at least.) 

I wanted to share with you the second part of the rustic wood art for Con-Man's room! Last week I showed you how I used pallets to build my canvas. Now I want to show you want I did with it. I've mentioned before that COn-Man LOVES cars; especially Lighting McQueen.

So I thought it would be appropriate to have Lighting McQueen make an appearance in his room. I started by finding an image of Lighting online. I enlarged it then printed it out in sections. If you want to use the image and try this project out yourself I provided the link to the download below.

Download

After printing all the sections of the image I cut it out and taped it together to make a template.

*If any of the following steps seem confusing just let me know- this took me a while to figure out how to put everything together, cut it out and then reattach. 

The next step was fitting my wood pieces together. (I only did this part for the outer sections.) I used long strips of a 1x2 that I cut in half to attach the pallet wood pieces together. First by drilling pilot holes then screwing them together.

Since the pallet wood was a little flimsy on the ends I used some Gorilla Wood Glue to hold them together.

Next I traced the image of Lighting onto the wood canvas I created.

I cut the inner pieces out first. I had to glue some of my smaller inner pieces together using wood glue.

Then it was time to cut the outer sections. 

This part had a lot of curves to so I had to cut it in pieces. 

And it might be time to invest in a real work bench. Our picnic table can't take any more abuse.

Seeing how everything is coming together!

This is how everything is attached in the back.

All done and hung! Con-Man thought it was pretty cool to have Lighting McQueen hanging in his room.

I like the way it turned out but I'm debating on doing one more treatment to this project before it's fully complete. 

What do you think? Not bad for a completely free piece of art?!

And sorry about the not so great picture quality- there is a rumor that I might get a new camera for Mothers Day since my old one bit the dust.

A Blank Canvas

While re-evaluating our Master Bedroom I wanted to share with you the origin of the painting we have on the wall.

Back in the day when we first got married and didn't have a penny to our name our new Master Bedroom in our first home had bare walls all around. I wanted something up there but neede something that would fit in our miniscule budget.

Luckily I had some matching frames I had found when I worked at the mall. Our back door was next to Victoria's Secret and while they were remodeling their store they had thrown these away:

They were originally gold so to make them match our furniture I simply spray painted them silver.

I then cut out some cardboard to fit the size of the frames, alid some batting over it, then used sheets from my old bed as the canvas. I tried my hand at modern art by tracing several sizes of plates in an interesting pattern and painted them different shades of blue.

Not to shabby for a free project! But as proud as I am of my thrifty-ness I think we could do with a change.

Anyway- Sheets make great canvases if you want to make large scale art work on your own. I used them for these pictures in Con-Man's room.

You can use Gesso to make the sheet hard like a canvas or just use several coats of white paint you have lying around and paint over that.

And this weekend I'm trying to decide which to tackle first: painting walls or tackling the dated fans. Hmmm, which one which one?

Paint Sample Wall Art

I was out garage sale-ing the other day (still looking for those elusive dining chairs....) when I came across this:

It's some kind of board that used to hold letters for printing newspapers. Only a few of the pieces are left, a few symbols and numbers. But I thought it was interesting and had potential.

At first I was going to follow my "I am only shopping for chairs and nothing else" rule but I really liked this. And the guy selling it was willing to go down from $15 to $12 which I thought was a good deal. So I bought it!

My plan was to use the old paint samples I had from when I was deciding on colors for our house to add some color to the board. Each chip was actually an 8.5 x 11 sheet so I had a lot to play with.

I started by measuring the spaces of each strip. Each one was different so I had to be sure I measured correctly.

After all my measuring I cut my paint strips.

Finally I glued them all down and hung it up! Easy!

Without Letters.

With Letters.

And an overall shot.

I really like it, and for only $12 I like it even more! What do you think? Should I keep it with the letters or without?

Linking to The CSI Project!

In the meantime-

Here's some stuff I have been working on; (I promise this blog will not be all baby stuff but it's all I've been able to do lately...)

So ever since I found out I was pregnant I wanted to give my baby the coolest stuff around. None of that Baby's R Us everyone's got one junk.

I had seen these cool wall hangings on Design Public and loved them! But a) they weren't the right color and b) they are way expensive! Here's the website incase you want some of your own: http://www.designpublic.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=spot+on+dog

So I tried thinking of ways I could make them myself and make them my own. I started by borrowing my mom's scroll saw thinking I could become a master scroll saw-er. Well turns out its not the right kind of saw for this purpose and I can't buy any attachments for it since its so old. Massive Fail as my friend Shelby would say.

Here's the scroll saw wasting away in our shed

.

So I needed another approach. I thought- hey why don't I just paint them? Hello!! So I saved the images I wanted from the website and sized them to the size I needed. I found some ready made frames from Walmart and covered them with a white sheet.

I painted the backgrounds the color I wanted them, cut out the images and traced them onto the squares. Then carefully filled in a cat, dog, pig, and cow. Now sweet little Con-man has animal friends to look at all the time!

I found the frames at Walmart for about $11 each. I used an old white sheet I had gotten from the thrift store for $1 and used paint I had left over from painting our house. So for about $45 I have custom made artwork that I won't mind having to get rid of when Con-man wants a change of scenery.

Much better than $260+ I would have spent on the wooden ones online!