tag: art



 

Our house: office gallery wall

So as I mentioned last week, life has been busy. Hectic. Unorganized. So not much has gotten done around the house but I am trying to keep doing things that don’t take a lot of time or supplies. One of those things has to finally hang photos and art.

In my office I have a wall across from my desk that I stare at all day long and I decided to create a gallery wall full of images & objects that mean something to me or just that I like to look at.

And it is done!

my office gallery wall

I love my wall. It is random and pretty and makes me smile all day long.

Starting from the top left here is what it consists of:

  1. ‘be’ canvas – dollar store canvas and some paint. I printed the word off on my printer and used carbon paper to trace it on the canvas and just painted around it letting the white canvas show through. I made to remind me to just be myself and not worry what anyone else thinks about me.
  2. paper tole flower art – this was my husband’s grandmother’s. She had it hung in her house and we received it as a gift to remember her by. His aunt made it and I reframed it in a Ikea Ribba frame to bring it up to date. I love it!
  3. grateful print – by vol25.
  4. lanscape print on canvas – $5 from a flea market
  5. clock – $4 from walmart
  6. peace print (grey print in the black frame) – free printable from simple as that. I love this print because I had chosen ‘peace’ as my word of the year and this describes what I mean by that perfectly.
  7. skeleton key – found at a local country general store
  8. wooden letterpress ‘j’ – a gift from a friend. So happy to have it on my wall!
  9. mini canvas – a canvas I created using my grandmother’s handkerchief.
  10. dream – metal sign I purchased at a home show years ago. Was originally aged white paint and rust coloured so I painted it to go in here.

  11. Wizard of Oz poster – I have had this since I was in my teens. It is a mounted posted that was hung in my bedroom. It got placed in my office temporarily while we were dealing with our rec room carpet and I loved it. So it stayed.
  12. Photo of a rainbow – caught this gorgeous photo of a low lying rainbow in the back fields near our house. Took the picture with my iPhone and loved it.
  13. small print in gold frame – $5 at a flea market
  14. letter j – this was a cardboard letter from the dollar store and I covered it with some free printable paper with modge podge.
  15. a picture of me and a dolphin – a picture from a vacation I took where I got to meet (& kiss) a dolphin.
  16. Julia Child print – from unraveled design.

Up next? Painting the cabinets, organizing my files & making a note board.

 

mini canvas

So since I have been working on a gallery wall in my office as well as adding some new art to the kids’ rooms, I have been keeping my eye out for things around the house to make interesting and meaningful art. And this mini canvas is a perfect example.

This was a souvenir handkerchief my grandmother had in her possessions that I was given after she passed away. It was from Florida and I just really like the design and colours but don’t have any real connection to Florida itself. I just wanted to use one section of the hankie to showcase – the flower.

First I searched my house for the perfect frame but couldn’t find what I was looking for (and believe me, I have a lot of frames hanging around – my plans are to get them all on the wall by end of February) but then I remembered a mini canvas I had and gathered some supplies:

my supplies

So I laid out the mini canvas and used hodge podge to attach the fabric the way it would show the flower and the pretty scalloped edge. I also removed the staples from the visible side and just hodge podged the canvas down on that edge to make it look cleaner.

And now I have this little piece of art in my office.

my new wall art

And I love it!

 

things change

So things in the house are a-changing. I have an office (which is completed & painted & functional but disorganized & messy & not picture ready – future post!) and because I was moving stuff downstairs to their new locations, I made some changes upstairs.

First off, the kitchen desk area. I had NEVER taken a picture of this area while I worked there because I could never seem to get it all organized or tidy looking. It was such a small area and things tended to get placed, piled and shuffled. But I did find a picture my son took of it on his Fisher Price camera (hence the blur).

Before:

kitchen desk: before

Yup, it was THAT bad! Ack. But now that my computer, printer and paperwork are all finding their ways downstairs, this desk area has been reassigned for homework and my morning coffee/laptop time. Ahh! So tidy!

After:

kitchen desk: after

You will notice that above the desk I removed the painted stars. I love my stars but wasn’t loving them in this location anymore. They didn’t have enough presence to stand out & didn’t blend enough to only add texture. So I moved them into the dining room.

Before:

dining room: before

And I moved the silhouettes to the other side of the kitchen wall and framed them in black (didn’t like the black frames next to the black hutch but like them next to the white drapes)

After:

dining room: after

And lastly during all this change-a-roo-ing, I added to my kids art gallery wall. I realized I wanted something more filled up and had seen a picture on pinterest that I loved (and reminded me a lot of our wall!).

Before:

gallery wall: before

Inspiration:

inspiration picture from pinterest.com


[Source: asoftplace.net via janet on Pinterest]

So I added some great art the kids made (and a couple by their cousins during their visit). I painted the word “create” black (wanted it to stand out.) Made a “make art” painting myself. And just filled the wall.

After:

gallery wall: after

These changes have sparked a new energy into me and is pushing me to move forward with other ideas around the house. After all, if I don’t love it in the end…

I can always change it!

 

Fun New Artwork

So we are working on making Little Man’s room more of a big kid room. We have changed the bedding and are in the process of adding more artwork to his walls. I was trying to find something cute and fun yet totally appropriate for his wall and came across this great tutorial on how to make a comic strip style photo.

So I took this fun photo we took last month at an ice cream shop:

before comic book styling

before comic book styling

And created this:

after comic book styling

after comic book styling

I’ve put it in a frame and it’s ready to hang. So fun!

 

live, laugh & love

One of my favourite quotes I read years ago was so simple in its meaning: “Live well, Laugh often, Love much”. Way back when I heard this quote I happened upon really great wood letters at the dollar store and picked up everything I need to write out this quote. And scavenged in my collection of old canvases to find one I had gotten WAY back in my Omer Deserres years (it had been painted on, used for display, was ripped and being thrown out so Leslie gave it to me – thanks Leslie!). When I purchased all these pieces, I fixed the canvas, added more texture to it, glued on the letters and painted it brown-ish.

And didn’t like it. So I then painted it green.
Which I kept for a while and then got sick of.

Finally, in my new house, where I want interest without too much contrast and things simple and pretty. I got it right. I painted it soft white. It is exactly what I want, interesting without being glaring. Here it is:

live, laugh & love

live, laugh & love

I especially love how it balances out the closet on the opposite wall of the hallway now, how they both bounce light back and just how easily it fills up that wall.

i love my bright hallway

i love my bright hallway

Next up: the stairwell.

 

Robot Painting

While working on our son’s room, I had an old robot painting I did for him a couple of years ago. Here is an old picture of it:

robot painting: before

robot painting: before

I liked it but never loved it. It was fun and colourful but too symmetrical and simple for my liking. So I decided to add some texture. And by texture I mean words. So I looked up as many words as I could find that could be associated to robots. I designed it in Illustrator, printed it out and transferred it to the canvas with carbon paper and painted the ones that were in the background. You can see in some areas, the carbon letters go over the robot that I did not paint. I liked the added interest it gives, and now it looks like this:

robot painting: after

robot painting: after

I am almost done the rest of his room, and will post pictures of the completed room soon.