New Art!

Dennis was joking with me the other day about the way I don't like to play video games much anymore because I feel like I could be doing something more productive, yet I'll sit on Pinterest forever getting "inspiration" and not doing much of anything with it. Well, he has a point I must say, so I've decided that I'm going to try to use the tutorials and such I find via my new favorite website as much as possible. The painting above that I made this past week for my bedroom may look familiar to some of you. I found the tutorial via Pinterest, and also discovered a fantastic blog that I'm not sure how I missed called A Beautiful Mess.

The basic idea is you find an old painting at a yard sale or thrift store to use as the base for your new text-based art. I found this lovely lady for two dollars at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse while hanging out with Dennis and my friend Carolyn. The Depot is just like a thrift store but they sell things for artists, so there's lots of random junk. Milk cartons, old dried up paint, a bin of about a thousand lemon-shaped stress balls for about ten cents each, just to name a few (and yes, I did buy a stress ball). There were plenty of paintings to choose from but I liked the muted colors of this lady. So, as per tutorial instructions I went to the craft store and bought a pack of  2" adhesive letters. They're helvetica, which seemed appropriate for such a hipstery art piece, and I had a 40% off coupon so they only cost me three bucks. I had a hard time finding them at first; they're in the paint section with the making tape.

I cut out the letters and laid out my message. Since I only bought one package I was short the last S and A and had to reuse the ones at the top, but I bought the repositionable adhesive letters so that wasn't a problem. The tutorial said that spray paint would probably be better than using liquid acrylic and a paint brush like she did because the paint tends to bleed under the edges of the letters. I didn't have any so I tried using a stippling brush (the flat-ended ones you use for stenciling) for the first few coats but I still got some bleed-under, which still looks fine. But really, if you want to do this get a can of spray paint and the whole thing will go a lot faster. 

For the last step after everything was dry I painted the edges of the canvas a bright metallic gold to help ground it on the white wall because I really like the way it looks without a frame.

 I'm so insanely happy with this! I think it would be fun if you take a photo of what the painting was beforehand and stick it on the back of the canvas. I can see the naked lady because I know she's there, but other people can really only tell it's a person because her face is very obvious, but they don't know it's a nude until I point out the naughty bits in some letters lol.