So...you know those ugly, old, brown panel walls from the 1970's?
Yep. Beautiful, I know. My Mom was so sad about losing it, I'm sure. Anyway, as I was leaving her house a few weeks ago (in the middle of the remodel) I noticed a nice big piece of this stuff. I am not even sure what part of the house it came from. Anyway, I asked her if I could take it. She was like, "Ummm..yeah?" So I did. I have seen so many pins on Pinterest of people doing artwork on wood, so I decided I would try my hand at it. Since I have sort of a blue, tan, brown, green, beachy vibe I am trying to start up in the house, I decided to go with something along those lines.
First I took the board out to the garage and painted it completely white with some flat wall paint I bought at Walmart in a 5-gallon bucket about...3 years ago. I randomly use it for stuff. I got it out of the clearance paint for like $15. My camera wasn't working at the time, so the first couple of pictures are from my phone. Forgive!
Here is the board. I forgot to take a before photo, so most of it is already painted.
Like I said, I used paint that I already had. I also used a rather wide brush. I tried to do mostly "dry brushing" because I wanted it to dry quickly and have a weathered, rustic look.
In some spots I layed it on a little thick, so I went and rinsed out my brush and went over the paint with a tiny bit of water still on the brush. After each stroke I wiped my brush with a paper towel. This is what it looked like after I had finished with the white paint.
I let that dry for...a week? It definitely could have been dry after 20 minutes or less, but I ran out of time to work on it, so it had to wait awhile. A couple of days ago I remembered that I had a blog and something to do for it. This blogging business is going to take some getting used to! I decided to give the next step a go and get some lines drawn on this thing!
I started out by using painter's tape to try and tape of the edges so I could just paint over it and not worry about anything bleeding over the lines. This did not bode well with my personality, as I could never get the tape quite right and I didn't feel like looking for a compass to make sure my angles were correct. So I went the old fashioned route...and used a ruler.
Basically, I just went across the board and decided how many chevrons I wanted. Then I measured equal distance to ensure that all of my chevrons would be the same size. Once I knew the distances, I started in on the chevrons. I didn't want all of mine to be the same with or the same distance apart, so it made me have to measure a lot more. At each point where the chevron was going to peak, I measure the same distance and marked that on the board. Then I decided how wide I wanted that particular section to be and marked small lines all the way across. There are many ways to do this, and the way you choose really depends upon your personality!
I basically just kept choosing random widths of the chevrons and the distances between each chevron set. This really took me about 3 days because I kept stopping and starting. Between housework, doctor appointments, kids, cooking, and other random activities, it's hard to get a minute to sit down and do this!
Anyway, here is the board after I finished drawing in all of the chevrons.
It only took me...a week to remember that I had to paint it. So about a week later, I headed up to the craft room to see what I could whip up in the paint department. I decided on a blue-ish green. I didn't really want to mix the colors together, only to highlight a blue color with a green. Here are the colors I chose to use.
Three Apple Barrel acrylic colors: White, Leaf Green, and Caribbean. First, I just used the Caribbean to fill in the Chevrons. I put a tiny 'x' in each section that I wanted to paint, to make sure I didn't mess up.
As you can see, I didn't try to get too serious with making sure the paint was thick or anything. I wanted it to have a sort of "washed out" look. Once I got all of my chevrons painted in blue, I decided to do some dry brush painting with the green. This means I took my brush, dipped it in the green paint, and wiped it off until there was very little left on the brush and roughly painted over the blue.
As you can see, I used very little green. Just enough to highlight it. If I got any clumps of green, I just dipped my brush in a little bit of water and evened it out. Once I was done with the green highlighting, I watered down some white paint and did the same thing. The almost finished product:
Now, the reason I say "almost finished product" is because I ordered some brass seagulls to mount to the board. I ordered these off Ebay a couple of weeks ago and still haven't received them, so I will update when I get them done. Nonetheless, I am pleased with the results even if it was something really simple and not that involved!
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