Colorful (Free!) Wall Art

Well, almost free. I spent $6, but you might be lucky enough to have the materials on hand. I have been seeing paint chip wall art projects (click here and here) floating around the internet and thought it looked easy enough for a non-artist like myself to try out. And when I say non-artist, I mean that my drawings look like I just entered kindergarten and I am incapable of coming up with artistic ideas... like this cool project.

Materials:

16 x 20 frame = $0 (leftover from our wedding, it held the seating chart poster)
White mat = $6 (A.C. Moore, forgot my coupon, darn it!)
Paint chips = $0 (Home Depot, Martha Stewart Collection)
Total Cost = $6

First, gather your materials. I had no idea how many paint chips I would need, but Tim and I knew what color scheme we were going for, so we just started grabbing whatever caught our eye. We ended up with just 1 extra. (Don't worry, no one looks at you weird when you walk out of the paint section with handfuls of these guys, they are meant to be taken!)

I layed the mat over the inside of the frame backing and traced around the inside so I would know where to line up the paint chips. (Tim would like to add that he thinks they are not called paint chips. Paint samples? Paint cards? I'm still calling them chips.)

Next, just start trying different layouts. Again, I am not an artsy person, so I just did what I thought looked cool. I ended up making 4 rows of 6 paint chips, going light to dark, keeping the color groups relatively together. Didn't snap a pic of it, but I laid them out first before taping them down, and was glad I didn't just dive in with the tape because I ended up rearranging a few.

I didn't do much measuring, because I think it's time consuming and annoying. Some architect I would have made! When I had all of the paint chips taped down, I trimmed the excess off the bottom, laid the mat overtop and framed it up.

As you'll notice on the left, my non-chalant attitude towards measuring probably wasn't the best one to take, because the first column is slightly more narrow than the rest. Oh, well. It doesn't bother me, and it's hanging in our bedroom, not an art gallery. I also thought about gluing down each paint chip, but I kind of dig the slightly raised/3-D look that it has with them being popped up a little bit. And I also love that the names of the paint colors are still showing. "Darkening Sky", "Plum Pudding", "Sea Glass"... that Martha Stewart comes up with some awesomely accurate names for her paint colors.

Our bedroom is officially on it's way to being (somewhat) decorated. The blandness has been bothering me lately & the baby's room has been consuming most of my interior design budget, so finding a quick & free art project like this is exciting!