Re-Purposing Art

Well, it's been a really hectic past few weeks. With my parents relocating here from South Dakota, Hurricane Sandy blasting the east coast (thankfully, we didn't lose power or have any storm damage!), and throwing a jewelry party with my mom, I've really been neglecting my lovely little blog!

A few months ago, I decided I wanted to re-purpose some art into one of those trendy quote pictures I've seen all over pinterest.  I thought it would be easy to just reuse a couple of paintings that don't really mesh with our style anymore into my modern, uber trendy idea.

Cool and funky but not really "our" look anymore.

 All I had to do was cover them with some fabric and then paint on the phrase I wanted and bam, new awesome art, RIGHT???

So far so good. The new "canvas" looked great. I wanted a spiritual phrase and I liked "It is well with my soul" (if you don't know the story behind that song, stop reading, open a new tab and look it up NOW! It's unbelievably touching!) and was just going to freehand it on in gold paint. Sounded simple enough... too simple.

Heh, not so fast. This DID NOT turn out the way I wanted it to, AT ALL. You can see the gold pretty well with my camera flash but in real life, it totally blended into the super busy background :( The more I messed with it, the worse it looked. After several tries to salvage it, I finally threw in the towel and gave up.

Not one to easily give up, just ask Mr. B, I tackled it from another angle. I chose a different quote, a different canvas, and a different medium. This time I found my base at Goodwill. Check out this little gem that was in perfect condition and perfectly in need of being re-purposed!

What's that you say? Why, yes, that IS a sea/porchscape on a solid piece of wood! I'm sure there's a dentist's office somewhere that will never know the joy of this masterpiece but alas, I have no regrets in destroying it.

After a few coats of black and turquoise spray paint and finding the right blending technique, I finally liked my background.

Last time I thought it would be wise to "freehand", um yeah, that was dumb. I bought stencils. But what to say? I still liked the "It is well" quote but decided to take this a different direction. I love the Bible verse from Joshua 24:15 that says "Choose you this day whom ye will serve as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." and have always wanted to incorporate it into my home but the only versions I'd seen were really grandma-y, needlepoint, some random nature background, etc. Ok, perfect, let's do this!

This is more like it! Again, I ran into an issue with the text being hard to see. So I went over the black with a coat of gold paint and SUCCESS!!! 

 I love the way it looks AND the message, score two for Mrs. B!!!

*Post Script

So my mom was reading through my blog and starts giggling. She then goes out to the garage, comes back in with THIS... 

and says "I was going to give this to you but I think it may be too 'grandma-y'" HAHAHAHAHA