Head over Herringbone

The space above our bar needed help.  When we moved in, I put up some frames and some beachy objects, and while the "art" always seemed to attract a lot of compliments, it always seemed to bother me because it didn't really seem significant enough for the space.  You can see what I mean in this shot of yore (the green/blue frame collage that's pretty much dead center in the picture).

But it stayed like that for 2 1/2 years...mainly because I couldn't figure out what to put there instead.  But last week inspiration struck me in the form of Pinterest (of course).  I had such high hopes for this project that I literally couldn't wait to get started.  So I did, and I must say the final product very much lived up to my very high expectations.

Are you all as in love as I am?  And in case you're interested in making one, here's some basic directions.

First up, you will need:

• canvas (I was lucky enough to recycle mine from another former project)
• acrylic paints in your choice of colors (I did greens, blues, and a little bit of yellow)
• 1 inch painters tape, cut into 4 inch strips
• spray paint (I used white, but I'm thinking something metallic would be fun too)

To begin, take your canvas and smear the various acrylic paint colors on it.  Think finger painting and just go to town!  To give you an idea, mine looked like this at the beginning:

And after a bunch of random smearing, it looked like this:

While that was drying, I got to work cutting my painter's tape into 4 inch long strips. I found the easiest way to do this was to line the tape up against a ruler, draw a little line every 4 inches, and then cut those strips off.   

The good news is it only took me about 5 minutes to repeat that process enough times to end up with this many strips:

The bad news?  That many strips only covered about 3 rows on my canvas, so I had to repeat it about 4 times.  Oh well...I had honestly expected it to be worse!  

So, with the strips cut, I got to work laying out my herringbone pattern.  Since the strips were all measured, I really didn't have to be too careful with laying out the pattern and just eyeballed it...over and over and over again.

As I continued to fill in the canvas, I also took a few random strips off so that those spots would be white once it was spraypainted.  And about an hour later, I had the whole thing filled in and ready to paint.  

A couple of coats of spray paint and some drying time later, I removed all the painter's tape to reveal my masterpiece.  I let it sit outside and cure (that's my fancy word for get rid of the spray paint stink) overnight and then eagerly hung it over the bar.  

I'm a big fan of the new look.  What about you?