A Hands-on Art Project: Pear Painting

We have slowly been making over John’s sister Emily’s nursery on a major budget and we are back with another update. We already shared how we painted some modern vertical stripes…

… brought in large mirrors to open up the small windowless room…

… and whipped up a especially straightforward no-sew bed skirt.

But what about art? We hoped something modern and graphic to hang in the room, but did not want to spend much money to get it. The solution? Why not Hands-on it? So I did. To the tune of zero dollars and zero cents. Victory!

It all began when Emily was given some hand-me-down nursery art from a friend who mentioned there was no pressure to use it or anything, simply that she was done with it and hoped to pass it along. The blue color was a bit more pastel than the muddier gray-based blue that we had going on in the nursery, so Emily suggested that we repaint it to create something new. We even had some leftover wall paint from our stripe painting project so it truly was a zero cost project (that was guaranteed to work with our color palette no less). Here it is before we primed it with some oil-based Kilz to prep it for repainting:

I was in fact especially excited to get back to my art school roots. Four years of it in NYC had me creating all the time, but in the five years since graduation I had slowly segued into painting rooms instead of art so I knew I was a bit rusty. The good news is that Emily’s modern nursery called for clean and contemporary art, so I settled on a plain two-color composition of three pears, which absolutely anyone can do. First I sketched the outlines of three not-at-all-ideal-and-that is-ok pears in pencil on the freshly primed canvas. I liked that they leaned in distinct ways and were slightly varied in size for interest, especially since I was only going to be using two colors for a simplistic result:

Then I filled in the pears using leftover yellow paint that we had laying around from some of the stripes that we painted in the nursery.

Next I brought in a slate blue background (with more leftover wall-striping paint) which ties into the crib’s deep blue skirt for even more cohesion in the room. Here it is after the first coat (about half dry, hence the distinct shades of blue):

Another coat of blue paint along with a second coat of yellow on the pears had everything looking a lot more solid and even. And we enjoy that three pears fit perfectly across the canvas since this will be Emily’s third child (and her son and daughter truly got a kick out of picking which pear they were and which pear was for the baby on the way).

As cute as the new Hands-on art looks on that lovely cardboard outside on our patio, you will simply have to stay tuned to see it in the nursery as we continue on with the makeover (next up: some storage, lighting and accessories to finish off the room). But that is how we got some lively art for no moolah and next to no work. Truly, anyone with a canvas (or even foam core, poster board or a piece of plywood) can do this project with some leftover paint. Simply pick a plain shape (an airplane? an apple? a heart?) and sketch it out. Then fill it in with two coats of paint and add in the background in another color for a modern pop-art-ish result.

What about you folks? Made any lively Hands-on art lately? Got any other straightforward ways to decorate naked walls on the low-cost? Let us put on our virtual black berets and turtlenecks to talk about how you channel your inner artiste.