Who Needs Expensive Wall Art?!

As mentioned in my first post, one of the things I’d like to do with this blog is take you step by step through my home renovating experiences. Currently, my husband and I are working on our living room/foyer/stairs/hallway (biggest renovation of them all up to this point). We’re so close, yet so far, so I will be somewhat stalling you for the next week or two until I can publish “the big reveal.” But I don’t want to give anything away just yet.

What I can do is tell you about a few things I’ve done to the living room while Todd is busy working on the stairs. One of them comes in the form of very cheap wall art – we all know how expensive paintings, photos and canvas prints can be. Actually, I take that back. I didn’t realize just how expensive those things were until I was in the market for filling up some of my empty wall space.

So I headed on over to Pinterest.com to see if I could take care of the dilemma I had. My dilemma of finding something to go on my walls turned into a dilemma of finding too much to put on my walls. I ran across this awesome canvas artwork from ReadyMade, and I knew that’s exactly what I wanted to do for my wall. After clicking on the ReadyMade link to read the instructions, I decided to do things a tad bit differently to make it my own. So here’s what I did:

1. I bought a 24″ x 48″ blank canvas at Hobby Lobby. All canvases were an extra 30% off, so I paid $16 for the gem!
2. The colors of my new living room are chocolate brown and a skyish blue, so I bought two cans of spray paint while I was at Hobby Lobby. I think those were just a few bucks.
3. I put quite a few less pieces of masking tape on the canvas than the original ReadyMade canvas. But I made sure to continue the masking tape on the sides – that’s a must!
4. Instead of spray painting with one color, I used both the colors I mentioned above. There was no rhyme or reason to my pattern; I just went with it, as you can see. I recommend doing this part outside on an old sheet or blanket.
5. The good things about the canvas material is that it dries very quickly, so I took the masking tape off within 20 minutes or so (I was getting impatient and wanted to see my results!).
6. I should add that it’s a good idea to have a helper through this process. It makes the tape and painting stages easier. So thanks, Mom!

I’ve still got a lot to learn about Pinterest, but when it comes to renovations and DIY crafts, I would imagine I’ll never have a shortage of DIY activities for the home. The best part is that I didn’t have to spend $200 on a piece of artwork, which keeps more money in my pocket to spend on other projects. Oh, and notice any similarities in the picture below and the header above? It’s too cute not to have on the wall of my house and the wall of my blog.

My new, inexpensive wall art