I need Help doing my own paintings!!!!!

chickmug

We have been looking for some pictures for our spare reception room used mainly as the TV room and in fact most of the time as our lounge. In a mad moment this week we bought three 20" x 16" blank canvasses and thought we would paint them ourselves.

However panic is starting to set in as even modern abstracts look hard to do. Perhaps we need to employ the painting elephant or monkey from the local zoo.

Seriously anyone ever done this and where can you get some inspiration.

pandora205

http://www.wikihow.com/Create-an-Abstract-Painting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PX-VZyO3fg

ormus

just type into google image search, abstract art.

10 million images come up. enough inspiration?

t_obermory

Instead of painting it yourself, how about covering it with wallpaper? If you buy a roll of the high end patterned stuff from between £10- £20 in Focus you can just paste it onto the canvases then. It really depends on the look of your room though as to whether not that'll work.

If you want to paint it yourself keep it simple, when I've done them I've just used tester pots of emulsion then you can tie any key colours in your room into it. Also masking tape's great for getting straight lines.

Alternatively you could always contact your local art college and see if they've got ant students interested in earning some extra cash, and get them to do them for you.

HTH's, good luck!

SailorSam

See if you find any off-cuts of material.

Alexei

One really easy idea is to give the whole canvas a couple of coats of background colour, then use masking tape to mark out stripes of varying widths. We did vertical stripes (easiest to keep aligned) but you could do them at an angle with a bit of measurement. By adding stripes of three different colours (one colour at a time) you can end up with something that looks pretty good (even if you're as artistically challenged as we are!). We used three shades of green and a brown because it fitted with our bedroom's coour scheme.

I'd recommend using acrylic paints; easy to work with and mix, and available in a good range of colours from any craft shop; we got ours from Hobbycraft. Be careful which masking tape you use; we tried the special low-tack tape first, worried that it would pull paint off the canvas, but it turned out it gave a really uneven edge to the stripes. The standard masking tape was much better.

lovethymini

Can I suggest an alternative?

Look through your collection of old photos, there must be one or two that are worthy of display? If you're feeling arty you could make copies of your photos, perhaps make them black and white, or enlarge one part of the photo....You could probably still use the canvases

I gave my hubby a canvas print of his motorbike, sounds a bit naff but its a really good photo and a beautiful bike, on a 40x40 square canvas it looks great in our hallway above the motobike helmets

Bronnie

t_obermory wrote: »

Instead of painting it yourself, how about covering it with wallpaper? If you buy a roll of the high end patterned stuff from between £10- £20 in Focus you can just paste it onto the canvases then. It really depends on the look of your room though as to whether not that'll work.

If you want to paint it yourself keep it simple, when I've done them I've just used tester pots of emulsion then you can tie any key colours in your room into it. Also masking tape's great for getting straight lines.

Alternatively you could always contact your local art college and see if they've got ant students interested in earning some extra cash, and get them to do them for you.

HTH's, good luck!

If you 'happened' to be in B & Q, and 'happened' to see a gorgeous wallpaper you liked, you could ask if you could take a sample, (well most people I see don't even ask) off the sample roll to take home and try on the wall. Of course if it was a large pattern you would need to take a full pattern repeat to get the effect.
If you 'happened' not to like it as a wallpaper when you got it home, you could always paste it onto a canvas as the previous poster suggested, so as not to waste it!

ZootHornRollo

i like your thinking!