Paint me a picture!

Okay, so last week I posted the pic I bought at our neighborhood yard sale.  The plan, paint over the original canvas (pray it wasn’t priceless) and update the frame.  I really had no clue how long something like this might take.  Honestly, I kind of thought it might take me a while.

Saturday morning while Matt was out golfing, I decided to start painting and see what happened.  I made a makeshift painting station in the garage.  One side has a small ledge a few feet up and a couple inches wide so I tape a sheet to the wall and was able to prop the canvas up on the ledge.  From there I just started mixing colors.  Originally I wanted to go more grey but my paint turned a little more green so I just ran with it.  I started off with my brush just mixing colors on the canvas.  (Really I should have put a white layer on first but I knew I didn’t have enough paint for that.)  So I just kept going, mixing paint and brushing it on.

Once I had the whole canvas covered, which didn’t actually take more than 15-20 mins.  I stepped back to check out what I had.  It wasn’t bad!  I liked the color gradients, so I grabbed a palette knife and started building the colors on the canvas.  At this point I was just mixing the colors together with the palette knife and swiping it on the canvas. And it looked pretty good.  Once the majority was done, I realized I needed to add a little bit of coral, since the bedroom is basically coral and white! 😉  A little red, yellow, pink and white and I had something that resembled coral.  I had no clue really where I wanted to add it and decided on a to just put it near the bottom and hope it didn’t look dumb.  It turned out pretty good and is really only a small touch of color.  After that I was done!
I texted a few people pics of it and they all thought it looked good.

Later that afternoon I decided I was going to work on the frame.  I ran up to my craft room and grabbed some rose gold and off white paint.  I used the rose gold to neutralize the brassy yellows currently on the frame.  Then I mixed my off white with a bit of titanium white and added water.  Lots of water.  It was kind of messy but the result was a nice, worn looking frame.  (I will say, the titanium white really wasn’t needed.)  The last thing I had to do was paint the outer edge of the canvas.  In hindsight, I probably should have painted that white first and then taped it off but I didn’t do that. I had to very carefully paint white around the edges of my newly painted canvas.  In the end, I ended up with a little more white here and there but I didn’t really mind the way it looked so I just left it.  I did go back and try to fix one corner of the canvas I wasn’t super happy with.  It was a little flat.  I can’t say it helped but it didn’t hurt it either.  Just added a little more color and texture.

I let everything dry overnight and Sunday morning Matt helped me reattach the canvas to the frame. Then I got up the nerve to actually sign it.  It was really stressful. 😉  But I got my name on the corner and it doesn’t look awful.

Now it’s hanging over the bed in our guest room!  I think it turned out really good!

~k