Art Project!

So, perhaps it's a stretch to call this an art project. I certainly don't consider myself an artist, and in fact the specifics of this project required nearly no artistic skill at all. But I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of people who might mistake it for art, so we'll run with that.

I've taken on several cosmetic projects for my bedroom. During the summer I bought a primed (but unpainted) dresser at a yard sale. I painted it a nice bold blue. More recently I got rid of the old pulls (they were the flappy kind you often see on old furniture); since the screw holes were at such an odd spacing anyway -- 2.25" when the modern standard is 3" -- I ended up just filling those holes, sanding them down, re-painting, and putting on new knobs that I like a lot better. I also sanded, primed, painted, and gave a new knob to an old nightstand that was starting to look a little sad from years of use. Between these, the paint job, and the curtains I felt like the room was really putting together a coherent color scheme.



(Note that despite how it appears in this picture, the wall color is uniform.)

Unfortunately, after looking at it a few too many times, two problems became evident: first, the walls were completely and conspicuously naked; second, the purples were too far away from the blues. I don't even know if that's a real thing, but it was certainly bothering me.



The obvious solution was to track down some art for the wall to bridge the gap and flesh out the color palette of the room. I spent some time on Etsy, eBay, and Craigslist trying to find something to fill the gap. Nothing really was quite what I wanted and everything seemed very expensive. I eventually just about settled on a woman out east somewhere who did mini-paintings, near-monocolored in any color you want, with all sorts of visible brush strokes to make things a little more interesting.

I decided that the nonuniformity was the part of her work I liked the least, given that everything else in the room is very much one flat color. After some sifting around on art supply websites it also became pretty clear that I would be able to produce similar work for much cheaper than buying it.

So I bough some canvas -- twenty six-inch squares -- and I picked out some paint samples at Menards. A few four-square-foot samples was plenty to do what I wanted.



The actual painting was time consuming but certainly not difficult. One color at a time, I laid out a few canvases and painted them each with a few coats of flat uniform color. I also put a layer of clear protective spray coating on them; it was something that artists on Etsy played up and the spray itself (certainly not intended for this purpose) was quite inexpensive.



The most frustrating part was hanging. My initial instinct was to drill a few shallow holes in the back of each canvas's frame and stick those on nails. It turns out that's very time consuming and has a lot of failure points. Eventually I realized that the better solution was just to put a pair of nails in the wall for each canvas (for those counting at home, that's forty nails I now have in the wall over my bed) and set the inner edge of the frame on them. The difference in the thickness of the frame is certainly no larger than my uncertainty in putting in the nails. Because I'm impatient I hung the squares as I went (though in the pictures I think that makes it easier to see what's going on).



They aren't arranged in any particular pattern, other than having one of each of my four colors in each column.



You can judge for yourself, but I feel very good about how this turned out. It seems to me that the room makes more sense now.