Saturday, March 10, 2012

DIY Decorations!

I decided the boring white walls in my apartment in Korea were too much to bear any longer. I wanted something bright and colorful to put up on the wall.

My boyfriend and I are fairly adventurous...let's just say we like to play outside. Our three favorite things to do are rock climbing, snowboarding and slacklining. So I created some silhouettes of these three things, typed up the word 'adventure' (in Century Gothic, of course) and taped it up to the wall! Simple as that.


What you need:
- tempera paint
- pictures of what you want to silhouette
- frames (or thick black paper)
- a printer

Instructions:

 
1. First you need to tape down your picture. This is important so the paint doesn't get under the picture!
Try to be as precise as possible so you have less touch ups later. This process takes a long time as well, so be patient!



2. Paint over the picture with your desired color, let it dry and peel off the picture and tape.
I found that it works better to add water to the paint (at least with my Korean brand poster paint). This way it is easier to spread and not so thick.




3. Let it dry!



4. Add your frame. I just used thicker black paper and cut out a square frame. 



5. Hang them up! Add some text, or not. Totally up to you!



Now, if I were not moving out of here within 3 months, I would have gotten real frames and made the letters in vinyl, but since these will likely end up in the trash in 3 months, I made them cheaply. And I am very happy with the turn out! You can see that mine are not perfect, but I didn't intend them to be. I ended up painting over the silhouette with white paint because of my bad tape job. However if this was going to be a semi-permanent thing in my house, I probably would have re-done them!

Please post pictures if you try this out! Any comments or suggestions are also welcome!