DIY Large Entry Artwork

Taking a break from Disney posts for a quick minute so I don’t drive you all nuts to share one of my favorite DIYs to date.

*Originally posted on an in between blog in the Fall of 2017 when I trying new sites & templates… but here we are back on WordPress and it’s a new read here*

I have this issue in my house.  The walls are bare.  I mean barren.  It’s kind of sad.
Wait, I take that back.  I actually have gallery walls all over my house, but my living room lacked the warmth that art can bring.  And I’m a little cheap.  I will spend on the right things (if I can) but I usually regret expensive purchase and return them very quickly.

And art is a big commitment in most cases.  It’s not something we want to change all the time, we hope to love it, and if it encourages discussion, I say even better!  I looked all over for the perfect piece of art for my entryway.

L I T E R A L L Y.  E V E R Y W H E R E.

And I needed something pretty big.  Or at least that’s what I wanted and nothing was fitting my apparently very  specific criteria.

My new thing for birthdays is to print out a huge photo of the birthday boy or girl so after I did this for Olive’s birthday, it hit me… Why not do something like this as a permanent piece?!   Now all I had to do was find a photo that would work!

Enter my recent purge of old gross books.  Sometimes I buy old hardback books for the look of having a ton of books stacked somewhere.  They don’t have to be perfect, they just have to have a really cool cover or be the right color.  Yes, I judge books by their covers.  But I had grabbed this really cool book about Hawaii on time.  I swear I never looked in it before I decided it was time to let it go because the cover had gotten a huge stain on it.  But when I opened it, there were some really amazing aerial shots of the islands.  So I tore out like four of them and gave the book back to goodwill.  I snapped a photo of the photo and sent it to staples.

*I looked all over the book before giving it back to see who the pictures were credited to but couldn’t tell from the book*

I’m so happy with how it turned out and here’s how you can do it too!
And it’s actually been hanging forever, even though I’m just getting to this tutorial.

Heres’s what you need:

-Mod Podge
-Piece of fairly light wood for backing cut to size – In this case I did 36×36

-Trip – two pieces of 1×2 cut to size — I had two cut to 34in and two cut to 36in

-Pain Brushes

-Stain or Paint for trim pieces
-Staple Gun
-Wood Glue
-Hanging or Mounting Hardware
-P A T I E N C E

First find a large space to tackle this process.  I started in my entry because it was open but moved to the kitchen.  Then dump half of the mod podge all over the wood and use one paint brush to move it around fairly evenly.

Then you will want to pour the rest of the mod podge over the top and paint it all over to make sure all is covered for a consistent gloss.  I also took my hand over it a few times to smooth out all of the wrinkles as much as possible.

Then you let that dry for a couple days.

I did watch the wood warp a bit but it ended up coming back to flat.  If I were to do it again, I would make sure to keep it laying flat on the floor, the entire time while drying.

Now it’s time to paint the trim!
I was trying to stay as on budget as possible so I ran around to see what we already had.
I found these mini stain cans that only run about $5 or $6 anyways, so not a huge invenstement.  I also had some of this Chalked paint left over.
I had originally wanted a natural wood look, but the paint looked better and helped the photo pop.

Once they were all painted, I laid the pieces of the frame together as they would go around the photo.  Then I took my staple gun and put two staples in each corner for a very simple look.

Then I thought I could just staple the frame, but that didn’t work.  The staples wouldn’t go all the way through and fell off.  This could probably be rectified with longer staples, but I was working with what I had.

So I resorted to wood glue… I did a small bit around the edge where the frame would be placed.
Then I added a little extra weight…
(Oh Sweet Baby Olive)

And we used the following pieces to hang the artwork.

And that’s all!  It really wasn’t that hard and I could have finished in a weekend, but things just got in the way!
But here’s the entry before…

And the entry keeps evolving…