Deck the Walls

I've been looking for some more artwork for Miss Priss's room. I wanted something to hang on either side of the mirror here because I think it looks a little bare.



The only problem is that it's hard to find original children's artwork for girls that doesn't say "Princess" or "Diva" all over it. I know that stuff is really popular right now, but it doesn't really appeal to me. To me (and this is purely my opinion), princess is just a nice way of saying "spoiled" and divas were originally called that because of their propensity to throw temper tantrums when they didn't get their way...neither of which are personality traits I want to see develop in my child.

So I started looking in the not-so-usual places for interesting artwork that I could possibly frame myself and hang on the wall. I looked in children's books and found some wonderful illustrations, but the pages I loved the most had text on them and I that's not what I wanted for this room...but wouldn't it be cute to frame iconic pictures from "Alice in Wonderland" or maybe "Watership Down"?

That's the great thing about art! It's so subjective that anything you want to put a matte and frame around is art. Who's to say it isn't?

Anyway, I was shopping in Target the other day and I found these cards in the stationary section.. They're by an artist named Mary Ann Johnson. By luck, they were selling exactly four unique images, so I bought them.

I wanted to matte them so they would fit in a standard 5x7 frame, but didn't want to pay to have them custom cut in the color I wanted, so I bought four white mattes and spray painted them a light green.

Here are the mattes before paint...

And here they are after the paint...

I then bought some inexpensive 5x7 frames at Hobby Lobby. They were cheap, cheap, cheap, but of course, not the color I wanted so I had to paint those too.


I painted them a creamy white and then ran some sandpaper over them to give them an "antiqued" look, framed up everything and here they are!



I haven't hung them on the walls yet, because I want Hubby to help me make sure that they are spaced correctly and his vertigo has made him utterly useless to me this week, but maybe I'll get them hung this weekend and I'll post the true "AFTER" then.

The Breakdown:

I bought the cards at Target for $3.95 a piece in the stationary section. I bought the mattes pre-cut at Hobby Lobby for $1.00 a piece. The frames are standard 5x7 and they were $2.50 at Hobby Lobby (50% off) but if you don't have a Hobby Lobby in your town, they have similar frames at Wal-Mart, they were just 50 cents more.

The frames are painted in a creamy white spray paint that I had leftover from something else and the green paint I used on the mattes was "Prairie Green" and I got it at Michael's for about $4.00.

So the total cost for these pictures was less than $35 for all four PLUS this project was done entirely in one day. Not too shabby, I say in all modesty. ;o)

Lessons Learned:

When spray painting paper mattes, point your spray paint to the top left of the matte and depress the nozzle. Start spraying a little to the left of the matte and then sweep it evenly over all of the mattes without letting up on the nozzle. This will give you even coverage and you won't get that "spray paint look" that can happen if you use short, quick strokes.

When working with spray paint in the summer, try to paint in the morning because the bugs aren't as bad. There's nothing more frustrating than coming back to check on your project and finding a dead insect stuck in the paint. They leave little dead-bug carcass prints on your project forcing you to start over.

Repeat after me, "Take the time to prime!" I didn't, of course, because I wanted to save time and what happened was the paint slid right off the frames. I ended up having to do more coats and use more paint than was necessary.