Thursday, April 19, 2012

DIY * art *



In my new living room!
  I seemed to have fallen off the face of the blogosphere for a while there, but I'm back! I've done quite a few things in the last several months, but sadly most of them were not documented. This is my first attempt at blogging again!

I got this idea from itsdoable and her tutorial is quite detailed (more so than mine), so you should check it out here!

original version
Materials Needed:
Canvas
Paint
Paint brush
Scissors
Scrapbook paper of various designs
Hot glue gun + lots of glue sticks

I wanted to do this because I had an old DIY painting that just didn't cut it anymore and I figured I could upcycle the canvas into a new piece of art. I used some sample wall paint to paint over the previous painting and it covered really well.

it looks black, but the color is a deep blue
Once I had the canvas painted and it had dried overnight, I was ready to start cutting a million little "petals" for the flower. I bought some scrapbook paper at Michael's on sale for .20/sheet and pretty much fell in love with a certain color scheme. Cutting out the petals wasn't so bad, I think it took about 30 minutes and I did it while watching TV. Simply cut out squares or rectangles and then shape them into petals. It's best to have various sizes so that you can fit them in place as needed.

cut out square turned petal
Once you have a good amount of petals, you can begin a dry run of placing the petals on the canvas to determine if you need to cut some down more and to get a general design. Start with the middle circle and make your way out. You can then get your hot glue gun and start gluing the petals down. I managed to burn myself with the glue more than a few times, so try to avoid that. As you go along, you'll find that you don't have enough petals (like me) and go back to cut some more.
my finished product
Make sure you have a few go off the edge, for added effect. I like how mine turned out and it only took about 1-2 hours total. What do you think?