Pinned it! Did it! Episode 2

I really do have a whole house tour planned. So far you've seen our half bath remodel and our bedroom restyle but I do have pictures of each of our other rooms to share too, (here come the excuses) but I am a florist and the next seven days are the craziest in my year by far. So basically I probably won't be blogging and if I am please forgive any typos, errors, and other signs of pure mental/physical exhaustion. All of that being said I didn't want to leave my loyal 3 readers without any Brittany blogging for too long so .. enjoy!

Pinned It

So I pinned this 2 months ago with the description "must do ... love" which probably won't help anyone else find the picture but definitely told me what to do. The original source is www.jillricci.com although I don't see this image there anymore. But by going there I did get and up close look at this piece and realized the beading I didn't know how to accomplish (I was contemplating metallic fabric paint, but ended up opting for simplicity) was literally beads, seed beads in gold. I still think I will leave mine without at least for now.

I started the project with Amanda when she did her tree painting.  That stage was just a lot of cutting up magazine images.

How did you cut out so many so perfectly you might ask? Well I actually cut out about twice as many as I ended up using just to have plenty of textures and colors to choose from. And I modified this template from Jones Design Company Blog (Thank you Emily). I printed it out at 1/4 of the size (4 per page) on card stock and then trimmed the top and bottom into points. Then I traced, cut, traced, cut, ...

For the background I used a craft store canvas and acrylic paints that I already had laying around my house (Why is the saying laying around?). Actually all my acrylic paints are in a plastic shoe box sized tub in my well organized craft closet that you will see should I ever get to the rest of the house tour.

I wanted to still capture the Moroccan feel of the original pinning so I used 2 shades of metallic gold. I also wanted to tied in the some teal/turquoise to add cohesion to the gallery wall (all the frames are a dark teal) and I'm also trying to incorporate cobalt blues into the gallery. So thats how I ended up with this color palate for the back ground.

I'm not a painter or really an artist (with the exception of flowers as the medium), but I just layered swirls and schwoops of color until I kind of liked it. Remembering all the while that most of it would be covered by my cutouts.

Applying liberal amounts of glossy Modge Podge I placed the shapes eyeballing the separations, and leaving some areas of the canvas (the ones I liked the best of course)  'unfinished'.

And then I waited for it to dry (boring - I really wanted to hang it on the wall the moment I finished but my husband talked me out of it, this also gave me the chance to spray a clear gloss coat of UV protectant finisher on so that the whole thing is glossed not just the Modge Podged pieces).  The whole project cost me $0 since I used supplies I has on hand, but even if you bought all the materials it would cost maybe $10 or so.

Did It!

Not to shabby right? I really like that you noticed the piece for all its color but only upon further inspection do you see the tessellating shape and then individual textures and patterns.

p.s. Did you notice the other Pinterest idea seen in one of the photographs?