DIY Art - Gold Arrow Copy Cat

Hey friends!!  Happy Wednesday :-)

Not sure if you remember, but a while back I'd posted about DIY art.  It all started with the inspiration photo above from House Tweaking.  Her post is great, but the comments... yowzers!!  Apparently people had some harsh opinions about her having painted over one UGLY piece of art that she didn't love.  I myself could not care less - especially since I LOVED how the arrow art came out.  Clearly.

Loved it so much in fact that I recreated it for our own house!

May I present to you, my own version of the inverted arrow art...

It's not the easiest to photograph, especially when it's hanging on a wall in a room that is currently being used as a catch all storage area for things like empty boxes, a loveseat that we just sold, and wood.  Lots and lots of wood that will soon become a planter for our deck.

I pushed some of the junk out of the way in an attempt to stage some pretty things around the art, and it was not my best effort... for sure... but you can totally see the paintings scale here.  Its quite large.

The canvas I used was actually re-purposed - my best friend left an old black and white stretched canvas print from Ikea when she moved across the country, and it made the perfect piece for me to experiment on. No one was going to miss that print.

So I painted over it.

Two coats of white got rolled on and after it dried, I went to work taping off my arrows.  I did some vague measurements, since eyeballing the middle of a 40" canvas is not as easy as you'd think, and taped the arrows out.

I got a mix of gold paints - including a bronze, and two different shades of gold from the Martha Stewart line. Not to diss Martha, but I was not impressed.  All the metallic shades were flat (not metallic really at all) and the gold looked mustard-y to me.

Back to Michael's I went in search of the magical Liquid Leaf.  It's nice and shiny, and I've used it on projects before so I knew it would work well.

You can see close up that I painted it on thicker in some areas for more dimension - sort of a 3-D gold effect, and it looks really pretty in different lights.

The gold leaf paint dries in minutes, so I peeled the tape off as soon as I finished, and that was that. Insta-art!

I'm certainly no artist, but it was fun to play the part one foggy afternoon a few weeks ago.  

And better yet, we now have a virtually free piece of art that is a nice focal point in our junk room office.

And even better still, we didn't have to throw out a perfectly good canvas even though we didn't like the art, so I like to think we're also saving the environment... even just a little...

So easy!  Happy Wednesday friends!