An Attempt at Art

So I decided that since they say you should try to de-personalize your house when you put it on the market by removing family photos and religious items (which sums up just about everything on the walls in our whole house), that I would try to come up with some creative ways to make some nice looking art that is very inexpensive.  I found some large artist canvases on sale buy-one-get-one-free a few months ago, so I got a couple of those and they’ve just been sitting around waiting for me to figure out what to do with them.  I had seen some hgtv shows where they found fabric and stretched it over canvas, or used wrapping paper, scrapbook paper, etc. and mod podged it onto canvas.  So, I’ve been keeping a look out for something I could use for this, but didn’t find anything for a while.  Then one day I was at Michaels and happened to walk past their posters.  I found one that I quite liked of a painting called Canal Facades by Michael Longo, and it happened to be about the right size for the canvas I already had at home, and I had a coupon so I only paid about half price for the poster too.  I’d read several online tutorials for how to mount a poster on canvas with mod podge, so I thought I’d give it a try.  I had hoped to find a poster that was just an inch or two larger than the canvas so I could wrap the image around the edges, but this one was just barely not tall enough for that, so I cut it down so that it fit on the face of the canvas, and painted the canvas with some leftover paint from our basement floor before putting the poster on.

So, I put mod podge on the canvas and flattened the poster down a little at a time, but it really wasn’t working out how I wanted it to.  There were very large bubbles/ripples that were quite noticeable – I thought a little texture would be fine, but I didn’t want the picture to be distorted or anything (I was going for something that would look cool, not something that would look home made).  So, I was pretty disappointed, but I just kept going.  I smoothed out the bubbles as well as I could, although I just couldn’t get it even close to flat.  But then I applied a layer of mod podge to the top of the poster, and I “painted” it on, mimicking the paintbrush strokes of the painting to give it a painting-like texture.  The texture part turned out great, but I was pretty bummed that there were such large ripples all through it – I thought I’d just wasted the money for the canvas and the poster.  When Michael came home he said he thought it didn’t look bad, and I did agree that if the light didn’t hit it at a certain angle, it wasn’t really noticeable.  I figured I’d wait until it dried the next day and hang it up on the wall, just to see how it looked.

So I was so excited the next morning when I went down to the basement and found that the large ripples were almost entirely gone since the picture had dried.  It had turned out great. 

I was so pleased!  I like the picture a lot – I love that it has a little red in it which ties in well with the throw pillows on our family room couches, but it also has a lot of other colors.  The “painting” texture turned out really nice, I think – although it’s not too noticeable unless you look at it closely.

So, now I just need to happen across another cheap picture I like for the other canvas (and cross my fingers that if there are ripples they will go away as it dries on a second picture too).  It’s fun to have a little bit of art work, and to know that I did it and it didn’t cost much at all.  And it’s fun that I found a poster of a painting that I really like.