Freakishly Easy Art

By Elisa|Arts and Crafts|10 Comments

Or, How to Create a Giant Letter Out of Fabric.

After staring at a large blank frame and a half-finished frame collage for weeks (after dutifully spray painting and hanging them all in a matter of days) we worked up the DIY strength to finish.

Since we didn’t have any large pictures or paintings sitting around we decided to throw in a giant ‘S’ and go from there. I opened up Photoshop, hit the ‘S’ key (and changed the font size to 1000) and started scrolling through fonts. We decided to keep it pretty classic and used Modern No. 20.

We printed that bad boy out and made sure it wasn’t too big or small for the frame:

Perfect. My original idea was to outline and color in with sharpie so I channeled my inner elementary-aged child and taped up my printed-out S and piece of 80 lb paper (swiped from an old drawing pad) on our window and started tracing.

Then I framed it up and stepped back.

It looked great — until you actually looked at it up close. Since there’s about two feet between the guest bed and the wall it wouldn’t be that uncommon for a guest to be up-close-and-personal with the wall gallery.

Those colored-in lines made me cringe. So I sat on the guest bed, stroked my chin, and thought about what to use. Paint? Different Markers? FABRIC?!

Hmm! I dug through my little drawer of fabrics and swiped a darkish green paisley fabric.

You can also see that we had some clouds rolling in. It’s been a freakin’ monsoon here is Charlotte for the past few weeks. I only took this picture 10-15 minutes after the first one.

Then there was tracing, cutting, and placing.

Waaay better! The subtle paisley fabric totally hides my inability to cut a straight curved line. Hah.

My Kindergarten teacher would be proud.

I also caught these little monkeys snuggling while I worked. They don’t play together much but I love seeing that they are totally bonded.