I’ve always been artsy, and I guess I have my parents to thank for that. My dad has been doing woodworking for years, and my mom has been painting for almost 20 years. I definitely can’t do woodworking, but I think I’m pretty good at painting. I used to paint things for my dorm room, and my ex had enough painted things that he could have used them for kindling after we broke up.

ANYWAY.

I’ve been lacking on wall decor in my office, so I decided to paint canvases rather than buy posters or signs. I bought three canvases at Michael’s, knowing that I was going to paint each one a different color and then put quotes on them.

It was a three night process last week. On Monday, I created one of the quotes in Photoshop at work and printed it out. That night, I painted the canvases and traced on the first quote.

Shout out to my mom for letting me use her supplies. This one was the easier of the three. The only issue I kept running into was smudging the pencil on the tracing paper and getting the smudges all over the side of my hand.

On Tuesday, I plotted out the quote I was going to use in Photoshop and printed it out at work since we have bigger sized paper. I ended up tracing/painting the quote three times: 1. Tracing the printed out quote onto tracing paper; 2. Tracing the tracing paper onto the canvas (you can see that in the picture with the purple canvas); 3. Hand painting the quote.

And the same thing on Wednesday night. The quote below took a little less than two hours to complete. Maybe it was my own fault for using a serif font, but I wanted them to look like book text since they’re both book quotes.

On Thursday, I brought them into my office to hang up. I used Command strips to hang them up since it’s frowned upon if we drill into the walls. When I was putting them up, I forgot to tell my co-worker—whose office is on the other side of the wall—so when I was banging against one of the canvases to make sure it stayed on the wall, he came over and was like, “Yes?” haha.

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I’m really happy with how they came out! They’re up a little high on the wall to cover up holes that were already in the wall.

Are you arts and craftsy? What was the last DIY project you did?