Another one about homemade art

One more post about artist canvases.  I’m not a painter.  I never had any formal training in painting.  I did have to take one drawing class in college and it was miserable.  I hated the critique days and having to put my deformed and pathetic sketches up next to my classmates beautifully rendered images.  But sometimes you need artwork for your house and you’re cash-strapped and you resort to painting it yourself.

Let me rewind for a minute.  A few months back I picked up a little canvas at the local St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop.  I searched high and low for the original images but to no avail — when I bought it, the canvas had a lavender background with white flowers painted on it.  It looked like something I would have presented in college had I been required to take a painting class (a little amateur-ish to say the least).  I felt a little bad when I jesso-ed over the canvas until I remembered it had been consigned over to St. Vincent de Paul.

Part two of this long-winded and potentially underwhelming story has to do with the brassy arc lamp I picked up at the auction at Vandeventer Vintage.  I was considering giving it a new coat of (spray) paint, maybe in black to help it fit in with the living room a little better.  (Read more of my angst here when we brought home a second lamp).  I decided instead of painting this great vintage gem, I would bring in more brassy/gold goodness to make it feel at home.

Back to the painting.  First I jesso-ed it, then I applied a few coats of a gold spray paint I had on hand.  I found a cool example image on Pinterest that had large blocks of color and used that as my starting point.  At first I had taped the canvas off with some 1″ painters tape we had around the house but the proportions felt weird so I “had to” order some washi tape from Etsy.

The washi tape didn’t perfectly keep the paint inside its boundaries so I had to do a little touch-up once I removed it.   I took over the tulip table and spent a couple of days mixing up paint colors like a mad scientist.  I used the kitchen blue color, the living room accent wall (SW Urbane Bronze) in its full hue and also lightened a few shades with white and a few new colors.  JT requested “light red” and I told him he just asked for pink.  However I was able to mix up a nice red-orange that seemed to satisfy his request.

The brassy/gold undercoat plus the paint colors from around the house really work to tie things all together in the living room.

Also, white fingernails!  Because Easter was last Sunday, I  feel like we’re in the clear  for white shoe season and I celebrated by putting one of my favorite colors on my nails.  Yesterday (Friday) was one of the first days it really, really felt like spring around here and everyone fled the office for City Garden at lunch.  I had lunch at Lulu’s, an all-vegan food truck (so good!) and took in the sights.  I know I talk about the Flaming Lips a lot, but this sculpture struck me as being very Wayne Coyne-esque.

On to the weekend everyone!  I’m taking Cameron to an adoption event today at the Kirkwood Wal-Mart from 11am to 1pm.  Stop by and say hi to the old guy!  Cheers – CT