I Think You May Be My Favourite Art Work

We have a cottage that we go to on holidays and some weekends.  It has lots of white walls (which we will probably never get round to painting).  I wanted to put some colour in one of the bathroom, without having to paint the walls..

The wall isn't that big, and lets face it, nobody spends much time looking at the pictures in a bathroom, so I wanted something easy and very quick to give a pop of colour.




I was inspired by the amazing colours in this illustration by Darren Booth for a Steve Martin Novel.  He shares how he achieved this look here.

I didn't want to follow this method,  As I wanted to work on a canvas I already had.


First I chose my words, and made sure they would fit on the canvas.

I took lots of great magazine and art brochure pages, and glued them all over the canvas.  The ones I used are glossy, and pretty thick.  This stops them bubbling when you glue them down.

Glue all over the canvas, or surface you are working on.

I spent loads of time working on the best layout.....it really didnt matter.  Diversity of colour was definitely good though.

I used the printed letters to cut out vinyl  (or sticky back plastic for those in the Blue Peter generation).

Because the vinyl is clear, its quite difficult to see where you are laying the letters.  I used masking tape to get a roughly straight line.

Once all the letters are down, paint all over the canvas in your chosen colour.

Once dry, peel off the letters for the big reveal.  This task is ridiculously satisfying.

The colours that show through are obviously dependent upon the base layers you use.

Once all the letters had been exposed, it looked more obviously like magazine pages than I really wanted, so I painted a rough wash of white and silver acrylic paint to dull down the lettering.  This gave a more blurred / impressionist type effect.

Et voila.