As you may or may not know, I have a new nephew on the way that should arrive within the next month. My sister-in-law, Erin, has had her hands full with a brand new job and a busy, busy three-year-old, so she told me and my mom that we could be in charge of the new baby's nursery and do whatever we want. So, to the fabric store we went... We picked out fabric and Mom got busy sewing curtains and bedding and we have already put everything up in the new room. I'll show you those pics as soon as they're uploaded. For now, I'll just quickly show you how I quickly made some really easy art for the walls.
First, here's one of the accent fabrics we used. Bright green with white elephants.
The last time I was at Michael's, their canvases were marked 40% off and I snagged a small package of four. I can always use canvases for something, and might as well get 'em while they're on sale, right? I had no idea if Erin already had anything for Still Nameless Baby Boy's room or not, but I figured these canvases were small enough that even if she did, they could be worked in somewhere. So I contributed them to the nursery.
The fabrics we were using in the room were bright green (like pictured above) and turquoise. We had a lot more of the green than the turquoise, so I wanted my canvases to pull in more of the blue shade. My first step in making my easy art was painting the four squares solid turquoise. I just used craft paint and it took two coats.
The plan was to draw one of the elephants from the fabric onto the squares. I really didn't want to mess up drawing over my freshly-painted backgrounds, so I laid a piece of paper over the canvases (to get the size right) and drew the elephant on it.
Not perfect, but good enough. Next, I cut out the elephant so that I could get it centered on my four squares and trace around it.
Then all that was left to do was fill the outline in with white paint. I opted to keep all the sides of the canvases blue, instead of letting the white paint bleed over onto them.
After filling in the body of the elephant, I freehanded the tail with my paintbrush.
At this point, I got to take a nice little break because I wanted the white to be good and dry before I came back and added in the last details.
I was kinda nervous about freehanding the ear, so I took the stencil I had used for the outlined and colored the back of the ear with a pencil. I was able to carefully lay the stencil back on top of the canvases and draw over the ear so that a small line transferred onto the canvas. Then it was as simple as using the turquoise paint to cover over my pencil line. I also added a small dot for the eye.
To completely finish it, I added a quick coat of water-based polyurethane to seal the paint and give it just a little bit of shine.
Super easy and, in my opinion, super cute. Nothing about it is perfect, but I think it's great for a baby's room. I'll show you where we hung it soon!