Having a home that I can decorate from scratch has always been one of my dreams. I have been fortunate enough to have a place to live and acquired a lot of hand-me-down furniture for the past 10 years of my married life. While it's great not having to spend a fortune on the house and home funishings, our previous home just lacked a sense of style and looked like pieces thrown in together to make the place liveable.
At our new home in North Vancouver, I am able to start fresh. Yes this means digging into our savings but the process of piecing everything together for this townhouse has been quite an amazing ride too.
For this post I would like to share an artwork that is so simple yet has such an impact, brings life to an otherwise very plain wall.
I found this via pinterest, and knew right away that this was something I will make. The original source was in Russian, but I think the pictures pretty much explained everything. I started with 4 blank canvases, hung them on the wall first to see how I will organize the colors and lay out my objects.
Besides the canvases, I also needed some paint, a bottle of spray paint (I used gold as in the source) and some found leaves/sticks/flowers.
I prepped the canvases with acrylic paint. It's been a long time after art school that I messed around with actual paint, let alone a piece of canvas. (I was in communication design so pretty much had my nose glued to the computer after freshman year) I used the cheap paint from Michaels and it worked fine. One thing I discovered was that the hues from the red color family do not have the same saturation/coverage as the cold colors, so for instance the magenta needed more coats and more colors mixed in to have the canvas covered completely, whereas the blues only needed a simple coat. My favorite mix was the grass green color, as when I saw that the essentially rather pretty grass green out of the tube had very weak coverage, I mixed in a bunch of different greens/blue/yellow to make it work. Gotta thank my color theory teacher!
Then there was the fun part of collecting leaves/ferns/flowers for the actual composition. This is the one part of the project where and 'artistic eye' was needed, and also having to keep in mind to find objects that had an interesting enough shape as well as a flat enough surface so when it got spray painted the silhouette would be clear enough. Speaking of spray paint, which many home craft makers are masters at, it was almost a bit intimidating as I have nevery really used it before.
The distance of the spray paint can to the canvas was the key. If sprayed it too close the fragile leaves would be blown away from the canvas, but if sprayed too far then it's very hard to saturate the canvas with spray paint.
I failed my grass green canvas, twice, actually, as the first time I picked an obejet that didn't have enough of a flat surface so the shape couldn't show, and the second time I held the paint too close to the canvas and messed up the composition. Talk about learning from mistakes!
The finised products, however, was fairly satisfactory. The metellic paint reflects the abundant light coming from the big bedroom window, and add a bit of lux to our room.
The dandellion piece is my favorite one. The stems were so fine that I was really afraid that they won't show after I spray-painted them, but to my delight it showed just enough so I could see its shape, yet the fuzziness around the edges adds dimension and depth. And the same thing happened with the pine branch too.
The fern turned out nicely too, and my third attempt on the green one finally had an acceptable appearance.
Now, with all the lovely pieces in place, (yes, loving my lamp and waiting-a-photo-to-be-chosen-to-put-in picture frame acquired from Home Sense) I finally have a bedroom that I feel like spending time in.
Huge thumbs up to the craft makers out there bringing so much inspiration and ideas to me!
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