DIY: Travel Watercolor Kit

The weather is getting nice so it's perfect for taking a trip to the park to hang out and paint a little bit. This week I'll show you how easily to put together your own travel sized watercolor (or gouache) kit that you can just throw in your pocket, purse, bag, etc. and be on your way!

Click here for an affiliate link for the aqua brushes.

I hope you like this weeks project! Now get out there and paint! :)

Paper Mache Halloween Decor Decoration

Hi, all! A few days ago I posted a tutorial on how to make Halloween decor out of paper mache, and today I'm going to show you some ways I chose to decorate said decor. Hopefully this can give you guys inspiration on your own Halloween decorating!

I hope you all enjoyed!

Painted Couch

Well, it happened. I joined the ranks of the crazy people who looked at their couch and thought, "I should paint that." I had seen a few examples of people painting their couches online, and after reading all of them, I decided I would just forgo the textile medium and just use latex paint. My reasoning was that latex paint was already very flexible, so I wouldn't need the medium for that. Also people use the medium to heat set the fabric, but from what I know about that stuff, it's to set the paint so it doesn't wash out in the washing machine. And I'm not throwing my couch into the washing machine any time soon. This whole thing happened when I went to Goodwill to look for a coffee table or dresser. So of course I found an awesome love seat and couch that I couldn't just leave there. The only bad things about them were the grandma floral fabric and broken springs. Both easily fixable. I made sure we would be able to get them home somehow (we have a small sedan... not really fit for transporting a love seat and a couch) and then bought those suckers. Here's a breakdown of this project:

Love seat and couch - $115

Uhaul(we need a truck...) - $55

Oops paint (grey, eggshell finish) - $5

 Total - $175

Really, I only painted the love seat, so I didn't know if I should include the couch in the prices and everything, but I did anyway. If you wanted to split up the couch cost and Uhaul cost between both couches, it would be around $90 for this love seat project. Anyway, here's a picture of these guys at Goodwill:

I didn't get any other decent before pictures of the love seat unfortunately because I was so excited about ripping the bottom out to fix the springs. I didn't get any pictures of that process, but it was pretty easy. I removed the legs and the fabric on the bottom and it revealed that one of the serpentine springs had come loose. Easy fix. I just used some pliers to work it back into place. I'll try to get some pictures of the big couch when I work on it so you guys can see what I'm talking about.

I had planned to paint the legs so when I had taken them off to fix the springs, I slapped a few coats of some white spray paint that I had laying around. I ended up leaving the legs off the couch for the entirety of the project so I didn't have to worry about taping them off.

Here is everything before I started painting. I got some "oops" paint from Lowe's for just $5. It was almost $20 off. Super awesome deal, it was in the color I wanted, the finish I wanted and was the only miss-mixed paint that they had at that moment. It was meant to be.

I knew I had to take it slow... I wanted to err on the side of more layers rather than less. Patience is rewarded. If I had just tried to slap it all on in one coat, it would end up blotchy and uneven. What I ended up doing was three layers. Layer one was about half water and half paint. Layer two was about 1/4 water and 3/4 paint and the last was only paint. This process worked out well for me. Of course, I cleaned the crap out of this thing before painting. It took a while because the couch has deep tufts and a lot of wrinkles and folds that I made sure to really get in to.

First things first, I took a small brush and tackled the tufting. I made sure I pulled each fold open and painted in there too. I didn't want people to sit on the couch, only for the folds to shift and expose flowers underneath the grey.

After getting in to the tufting and folds, I painted one layer over the whole couch. For the broad areas of the couch, I used a foam roller.

Day one, layer one. You can still see the colors from the fabric showing through.

Day two, layer two. Getting better. The fabric isn't showing through -as- much, but the paint is also pretty blotchy.

Day three, layer three. Pretty much right after painting. The wet paint is slightly lighter than what it ended up drying to. I waited a day to make sure the paint was completely dry, and then reattached the legs.

And here she is! I love how it turned out. It has a neat texture now. It's slightly shiny and at certain angles you can see the flower pattern of the  fabric. Not the colors, mind you, but the way the fabric was woven.

A lot of people question whether or not painting a couch is a feasible option because they think the fabric will get "crunchy." I knew this was a possibility, but I figured that since I wanted to change the fabric anyway I could just try this painting thing out and if it didn't work I could just reupholster it, especially since the paint I got was so cheap. As of right now, the couch is kind of "crunchy" but it's been getting better as it's being used, which I expected to happen. So for the foreseeable future, this thing is staying painted.

All in all, it was a neat project that I saw somewhere and knew I had to try for myself. The original plan was to paint both couches, but I've recently decided that I wanted to try my hand at reupholstering the big couch. I thought it would be a neat dichotomy to take the matching couches and show an example of the painted couch, and an example of a reupholstered couch.

I hope you all enjoyed my painted couch journey!

Ay Sus!

I'm Filipino-American so I know a few silly Tagalog words here and there that my mom says now and then.  My little sister and I like to combine some of these words to make completely nonsensical phrases.  One of these gems is "Ay sus ginoo, sapatos puwet kugmo!"  Any Tagalog speaker now should see that this doesn't really make any sense, but that's the point!  "Ay sus ginoo" is an expression.. kind of like saying "oh my god."  I'm often greeted with that expression from my mom when I'm just goofing around the house.  The rest of it is literally, sapatos= shoes, puwet= butt and kugmo= booger.  So yeah, as you can see, it makes no sense.  Spanish speakers may notice the influence their language has had on Tagalog. Anyway, the point of this post is that my sister and I wanted to make shirts with this phrase on them.  We would always talk about it, but never really do anything, so randomly I decided I was going to make mine at least... I didn't know what shirt she wanted to use, and I didn't know if she approved on the final layout of the letters.

Here's the printout.

Here it is after I got to exacto-knifing.

I spray-adhesived that sucker down.

Then I sprayed black spray paint everywhere.  Notice that I had to do some more masking off with tape to avoid overspray.

The finished product.  There's a little overspray on the neck, but I can live with it.  I loved how it turned out anyway.

So that concludes my experiment with stencils and spray adhesive.  I've done stencils before, but I'd always just kind of hoped they'd stay in place... I finally got my hands on some spray adhesive and used it!  Since making the shirt, I've kind of abused it.  I just threw it into the wash and dryer without setting the ink or anything, and it bled and smudged a little, but whatever, I'll still wear it.

Busy bee!

I've been busting my butt lately with school work that I haven't had time to craft :( I thought I'd at least post something to let you all know that I'm still here! And to give a little peek at what I've been doing.. art wise.. for school. I had a semester long assignment where we had to do a color study of 30 colors for each week of class. Of course, I put it off and had to do almost all of them during the Thanksgiving break. Yay, 300+ colors!

Here's my final for painting... four paintings, inspired by different artists. I'm so glad to be almost done with this class!

On top of those, I have to print and bound a book and print around 10 more prints for my book arts class. There's also the color theory assignment I have where I have to re-do an old piece that I've done where I'm not happy with the colors... twice. Oh yeah, and studying for my two other classes. Woo, the end of the semester! Hopefully I'll be crafting and posting in a week or two, when classes are done!