Art We Heart
Reader Redesign: Pizza Box Perfection
When Erin emailed us to share her insanely cool DIY art project (all the way from Spain!), we couldn’t wait to pass it along. It’s so creative it not only made us excited, it actually made us hungry. Here’s her letter:
I just discovered your site today from a link at AT. It immediately became one of my permanent favorites! I’ve been inspired by the thrifty makeovers you’ve featured and wanted to share one of my own. My hubby & I live in an apartment in Spain. We’re only here temporarily and our apartment is owned by the organization that we work for so we’re not even allowed to paint the mint green walls. Last week after finally becoming weary of blank walls, I succumbed to the crafty bug and created some “artwork” for our bedroom. My mom brought me some Mod Podge when she came to visit, so I did my first decoupage project using laser prints of something I threw together in Photoshop and a large pizza box. I’d been saving the (clean!) pizza box for several months under the conviction that I could use it for something creative. The Browning poem I used is one that we had on our wedding invitations, so it means a lot to us personally. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out and wanted to share! Thanks for all the inspiration! – Erin
Here’s Erin’s arsenal of unexpected supplies:
And the finished product:
Gotta love wall art that’s personalized and pizza-inspried. Mmmm.
Paint Inside The Lines
The year was 2005. We lived in New York. We were renters and most of our great design ideas had to be filed away for later. And today I uncovered something awesome from that file: an easy step-by-step guide to painting a dramatic mural in your home.
This is an article I scanned featuring a guy, Martin Rivas, who used a paint-by-number technique to create a retro-style mural in his New Jersey basement. Click the image above to see a larger (readable) version of the article, or just use my cliff’s notes version below.
Step 1: Pick an image that you love (which has similar proportions to your wall). Make your life easier and save some money on paint by also using something that has a limited color palette. Martin chose this vintage Mexican hot chocolate ad. Muy caliente, no?
Step 2: Go out and buy your paint and supplies (rollers, brushes, paint trays). Here’s where you save that money on fewer colors.
Step 3: Transfer the image to your wall. Martin did this using the age ol’ trick of drawing a small grid on the original image and a corresponding larger grid on the wall. Then you can sketch your image square by square in pencil. An alternate option is to use a projector to cast your image directly onto the wall and trace it in place (that’s if you’re the fancy type that owns a projector).
Step 4: Now it’s just like paint by numbers. Simply fill in the lines, starting with the largest areas first. Sounds easy but it can be time intensive. As proof, here’s an animated version of Martin’s mural coming to life (don’t worry, it loops – it’s just a tad slow).
Cool, right? Have any of you all attempted this? Seems straight-forward enough, so I just have to find a wall and an excuse for doing this somewhere in our house. If only I had a man cave…
Post-Haste
Here’s another cute collection-related idea akin to our vacation jars and our framed key art, and it costs around 50 cents tops. Of course it came from the mind of my creative (and cute) hubby. See, on one of our first vacations together he suggested as we were writing a few postcards to our friends and family that we save one and write it to ourselves. He thought it would be a nice way to highlight a few of our favorite details of the trip (that we’d likely forget after a while).
And we liked the idea so much, that over the past few years we’ve continued the tradition. It’s super fun to look back on our travels together and relive everything from our favorite meal to our sightseeing hijinks. And my contribution to “project postcard” was to suggest that we display them in an old vase (leftover from our wedding- it was actually where everyone dropped their sentiment cards) so we don’t have to file them away in the closet in some old box. Regularly seeing them in our space reminds us to look at them from time to time and keeps us excited for our next big trip.
So next time you’re on vacay, all you need is a quarter for the postcard and another one for the stamp. Bon voyage!
Reader Redesign: Card Shark
When Kelly told us that she had taken our greeting-cards-as-wall-art advice, we couldn’t wait to share her sweet mini-makeover with you guys. Here’s her letter:
I am an avid reader of your blog and admire and enjoy both of your styles and ideas. I really loved your idea about using stationary as art! I have been waffling on art for my baby’s room for some time – and was quite inspired by you! I knew that I wanted something graphic, that would mature and stay with him after the nursery stage. I had to share the results. I think it looks fantastic! Thanks so much! -Kelly
We love when something we’ve pictured in our heads actually comes to fruition, and we’ve been obsessed with the idea of framing these witty cards from Smack Of Jellyfish- especially for a nursery.
Thanks so much for sharing, Kelly! It looks great. And we know that your little one will certainly be well versed in animal packs of all kinds. Gotta appreciate wall art that’s cute and educational.
