My husband has been asking me to make him a new piece of artwork for his office, and at the same time asking for something with this twist on the 50 Cent song "99 Problems". If you remember from my
printable Valentine's Day cards, my hubby loves weight lifting.
I started with a 24" x 24" piece of Masonite I had hanging around my started-but-not-finished-artwork stash. After priming the board I collaged some ripped computer paper onto it with Mod Podge. (I actually printed out the Wiki article on Arnold Schwarzenegger since the hubby is quite a fan. The thought was that the text would peak through in the end product. Though this didn't end up working out as I had hoped, it's still kinda cool that there's more to the collage aspect than just random paper.) After the Mod Podge dried I worked some white paint into the gaps and lightly over the text.
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| You can see Mr. Schwarzenegger peeking through a bit here. |
Once the white paint dried (okay, so maybe I sped up the process with my handy heat gun) I measured out where I wanted the text. I used 2" vinyl letters in Helvetica font that I picked up at a craft store. I used my handy 4" roller to run a coat of black acrylic over everything.
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| Please don't mind the poop-like paint blob. The white oval is the edge of the foam roller. |
I peeled up the vinyl letters before the paint got too dry, using a craft knife to pull up a corner of each letter.
I used a sanding block to knock back the black, revealing the white paint and paper edges from the collage layer. This gave the painting a great "grunge" look.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I think I'm going to use the
soda tab hanging system to hang it on the wall. I'll let you know how that works out!
