Chalkboard Closet Doors for my Son

We moved in with my parents a few months ago to make things a little easier as I finish grad school, but until recently my son's room has been woefully neglected.  I've finally started sprucing it up a bit. 

Part of the problem has been that while I have wanted to paint a mural on his wall, there was no available surface.  Two walls have that wood paneling and the other two have this horrible texture (BTW, if you know a cheap DIY trick for removing texture from walls, please share it with me).  That left the closet.

The chalkboard that was in my last post - my son loves to write on it.  All the time.  So much so that I rarely get to use it.  I decided he needed one of his own.

I took down the old closet doors, which had this beat-up map glued down on it as long as they've owned the house (which is quite a while).  I gave them two coats of chalkboard paint and then painted this mural over parts of the chalkboard surface with acrylic paints.

I also gave the mural part 2 coats of clear poly-coat varnish so that it would hold up to the abuse of a two and a half year old.

I added a couple cup holder hooks and a pair of $1 metal buckets from Target to hold the chalk and the eraser.  I also bought a pair of matte black closet door handles and I had to buy one more tube of brown paint - otherwise everything else came out of my stash so I think the whole project cost me about $12.

Above is what it looked like before I "cured" the chalkboard surface (if you haven't used the stuff, that just means you rub the side of a piece of chalk all over the surface so that things erase more easily from it).

And here it is after it was cured and with the closet door handles in place.  I had a little fun myself before he got to it.

He'll see it later today and I am pretty sure he's going to love it.  :)

Canvas with Wings and Collage Art

This was originally a guest post that I wrote for Michele at The Scrap Shoppe last week...

A couple of months ago I redesigned my craft room and made this piece of art for my wall.

I wanted to put art on the walls that would inspire me so I looked up tons of inspirational quotes. When I found this quote from Emerson it really hit home. And as I read all those quotes I felt uplifted and wanted to try and show that feeling of soaring on inspiration. I started with a canvas and knew from the beginning that I wanted it to hang from a corner rather than the usual direction. I painted it with some acrylic paints, then decoupaged the quote on top. I used craft wire to shape the wings and then hot glued them to the back. I sewed on a layer of tulle and another layer of a sheer lining and then glued a whole bunch of feathers around the outside of the canvas.

My sister loved the quote and asked me to make her one for her office, but a canvas with wings wasn't quite right for her or her office. She also wanted something that she could frame. So after some thought, I came up with this...

It's mixed media: water color, oil pastels, paper collage, paint markers and gel markers. It wasn't as complicated as you might think... you just need to "build" it in layers.

I started with a 12"x16" piece of water color paper and marked off the edges so she could mat it to 11"x14" easily. I played with some water color paints just to start some colors for the background. If you don't have paint, you can start with any great scrapbook paper. Then I copied out the quote in a word processing program and played with the size and font until I was happy with it. I printed it and cut out the words ransom note style and the found some awesome images from The Graphics Fairy. Here you can see the quote and images at this point:

Once I was happy with the layout, I used a glue stick to glue it all down with a few more random pieces cut from magazines and catalogs.

I added some depth to the background with some oil pastels, but you can use markers or crayons too - whatever you like. Just play.

To finish it off, I had fun with some paint markers and gel pens and VOILA!

Flock, Divided

A couple weeks ago I ran across a very inspirational post about painting at Make The Best of Things. I love to paint, but don't get to do it as often as I like. I was already picking out paint colors for my kitchen/dining room and thinking I'd probably need some new art for my new walls anyway so...

It started out with 2 blank 24"x30" canvases and a sketch. (Ignore the doodle flower at the top of the page... you can only imagine what my notebooks looked like in high school...)


The great thing is that I got to choose all the colors so it would fit into the room perfectly. I'm not done redesigning the room so I'll just give you this cropped version of it hanging on my freshly painted walls.

I took it outside for a photo shoot because the lighting is not so great in my dining room.Overall it turned out really close to how I envisioned it. A little darker than I planned, maybe, and I had trouble giving the birds as much depth as I wanted because they were so dark... I guess in my imaginings they were black birds or the silhouettes of birds...

I struggled to come up with a title... it's a flock of birds, in a tree... but one is separated by the divide in canvas... Is the divide created or imagined? Or is it there at all? Does the lone bird see the divide or does it assume it is one with the flock? How come I painted this and I can't answer these questions? I guess this was paint therapy. Much cheaper than prozac.

Linking up to these parties...