Personalizing Some Subway Art

In the saga of the den (started in August), we’re finally on the finishing touches. I talked about the closet last week, but other changes have also transpired. Art, for example, is going up on the walls. I liked the idea of making these puppy silhouettes, courtesy of Karah at the Space Between, but when I tried to print out some pictures of Coco and Mack, guess who was out of black toner? This girl. Ever the lazy person optimist, I decided to try my hand at subway art instead, since I’d been planning on making some for the living room and wanted the practice.

To go with the future silhouettes, I went with a pet-themed painting, but didn’t want to be lame and just write the dogs’ names. Instead, I used the power of Google and translated “puppy” into a few different languages. Then it was a simple cut and paste job into a word doc followed by three hours of precise cutting.

As you can see, my workspace was on the couch instead of the “designated” craft room (i.e. the extra unused room upstairs) because I was on puppy supervision duty. Mack still grabbed a couple letters, but they have since been recovered.

I did a simple mock up on a canvas I already had (we’d stocked up on two packs of canvasses from Michael’s months ago) and got ready for painting.

Now, at this point, I could have spent another three hours carefully tracing each letter and meticulously painting, but instead, I just held the letters in place by hand and stippled on black paint with a brush. The only problem – which you’ll see below – is that one of the words sloped since it was hard to keep them all level without a guide. For a completely unscientific method of spacing and painting, though, I can’t really complain.

I don’t know if I would recommend this method, although it did work pretty well for me. If you want a more professional-looking piece, you should probably do all the measurements and tracing. I also knew I’d be painting the letters white so any errant black marks were nicely touched-up with a detail brush.

Then there was nothing left to do except throw it up on the wall. Since it’s so light, one strategically placed nail was all it took.

See what I meant about the sloping letters? Not perfect, but pretty cute anyway. Come on, it says puppy in five different languages!

The empty canvas is obviously a place holder for when we finally get some printer ink, but I needed to tack it up to determine where to hang the subway art.

And, yeah, you can tell we’ve been doing some other projects, too, but I’m saving that story for another day.