Painting Words Over A Canvas Meant for Customized Quote Art

Remember when I shared our possessed painting that jumped off the wall low-cost painting that we got for $20 at a yard sale…

… and mentioned that we:

• mostly liked the size of it and the chunky frame (which in fact came with a little dent in it – a total sign that this guy was a trouble-maker)
• were not in love with the art itself (it simply felt sort of generic and hotel-ish in person)

Yes? Me too.

And then remember when a bunch of you (seriously, like at least a dozen of you folks) recommended that we do some sort of letter stenciling over it like this genius creation by Emily Von Henderson or this masterpiece by A Striking Mess (psst – you can check out other excellent painting-words-over-things art projects here, here, and here).

Yes? Me too.

Well… we were sold. And the deed is DONE!

We debated simply leaving the letters unpainted and covering the rest of the canvas with white paint, but in fact liked the idea of white letters with the painting as the background. And it was in fact truly plain. Seriously, the hardest thing was deciding what we hoped our dining room wall to be saying to us every day. But we at last landed on an oldie but a goodie: All You Need Is Enjoy. Ain’t that the truth? It somehow has:

• an ode to one of my go-to bands (my dad and I know nearly every word to every album & even watch old Beatles movies together)
• part of our journal name (same last name, haha)
• a positive general message (it is not a bad reminder for any of us)
• a classic feeling that we hope is timeless (it should not feel “so last year” like Lady Gaga’s meat dress or The Bieb’s old haircut)

So for all of the above reasons, we went for it. The next step was faking this baby in photoshop first, simply to assist us picture it. Here is a swift photoshop rendering that I threw together to see what we liked:

I certainly do not think you need photoshop to visualize this though. We simply had it on hand, but if you do not I think a free program like gimp could work equally well simply for laying type over a basic image and seeing what fries your bacon. Aaaand we are back to meat.

Anyway, we realized that we hoped each letter to be about 5″ tall and the typeface we preferred was Optima Bold (with a point size of 507 which got it to be exactly 5″ tall). How did we know we needed the letters to be 5″ tall? I simply noticed in the rendering above that the stripe of green in the middle of the painting was about the height of those letters on top of it. So I walked over to the painting, asked it not to jump off the wall on me, and quite gingerly measured that green stripe. Five inches tall = the answer.

Then I printed each letter out in a quite light grayscale ink (to save money/ink) on card stock (only one letter fit on each page, but I saved all my leftover cuttings for Clara-projects so it was not too bad) and I was left with this:

After I cut them each out carefully with a scissors (and an x-acto knife when they had interior sections to cut like the O and the D), they looked like this:

Then I placed them all on my painting so I could figure out the spacing…

… and used a light pencil line traced around each one directly onto the painted canvas.

That way when I lifted them off it was literally simply a good old fashioned game of fill-in-the-lines, which I did with white acrylic paint and a small craft brush.

It only took one coat, and that is all she wrote.

The result = something that feels modern but still has those soft tones and texture behind it. It truly is a lively way to update a piece that kinda feels hotel-ish and mass produced. All of a sudden it is all yours (picking what it says, and even choosing things like the size, the color, and the typeface suddenly makes you feel like it is sweet and personal).

Oh and I had originally planned to paint the frame white but the wood tones in the frame tie into the exact warm oak-y color of the buffet where the paint is chipping off, so there is something kind of sweet about leaving him naked. And John was on the No-Paint Frame Train (choo choo) so he further convinced me to leave it be for now. I am in fact loving it as-is.

As for the cost, this update was free (since we simply used what we had on hand like existing printer ink, white acrylic paint, and card stock from our stash) and the actual project total was $20 if you include the loot we doled out at that yard sale for the art itself. Not bad for a personalized painting that is over three feet wide, right? Now let us simply hope this guy does not dive off the wall again anytime soon. I like to think he did that out of boredom but now that he’s more entertained by his outfit it’ll be cool from now on.

This truly was an straightforward, low-cost, and satisfying project. So if you have an old canvas, print, photo, or poster that you are feeling meh about (or you find something ok-but-not-remarkable at a thrift store) a $2 tube of white acrylic paint, a small paint brush, and a printer might be all you need to fall in love with the guy. Oh yeah and a scissors. You need those too. And you need a sentence that you like sufficient to stare at for a while. But that is the lively part!

What did you folks do this weekend? Is anyone else painting over art? Were you all out yard sale-ing? It rained for about 70% of our weekend, so I totally want a do-over. Who is with me?

Psst- Wanna know where we got something in our house or what paint color we used? Simply click on this button: