During my recent vacation, I was hanging out at my sister's place in New Jersey for a few days and the weather had turned overcast and stormy -- meaning we were pretty much stuck inside. So, we decided to work on an art project together.
Mimi had bought a wooden sign last summer in Vermont and had hung it over a doorway in her kitchen. The sign reads "Bromley," the name of the mountain community where we have spent several great family vacations, not to mention of her 3-year-old long-haired dachshund.
Here is a photo of the sign at the beginning (sitting on a beige rug):
I had an idea in my head, but needed some inspiration for particulars, so I did an image search online and found a series of cute wall art "words" by the pop artist Romero Britto. These served both as a guideline for the general design as well as providing ideas for decorative details.
I started by drawing out the letter separations and curved sectioning in pencil, so each letter would be outlined and also contain two basic background colors. Like so:
The sign was then painted with white as a primer, and allowed to dry. Luckily, the pencil marks showed through the white so we could use these as a guide when painting the letters the various colors, which we had chosen based on their potential as the new kitchen wall color.
We used several colors as is, and created a couple of other colors by mixing shades with white and/or black, to create 14 basic "sections":
Then, the challenging part began! It took a few hours to decorate all the sections (including a couple of "oops" -- where we had to repaint a section and start over).
When the sign was dry enough, I painted the black outline and curved lines demarcating the letters, which made the sign "pop" and also created a 3-D effect. That took another hour or so of painstaking work!
Here is the final version, and I must say I'm pretty pleased with the results. (Mimi was thrilled!)