Forgotten Fridays: Paint Chip Art

Sooooo I meant to share this post a while ago... like a few months ago. I am a blogging slacker. 

This is the quickest and easiest DIY art piece I've made. 

Jon and I have a ton of empty walls. We'd love to throw up some pictures frames and art but since we need so many pieces of actual furniture any decorative wall stuff is low on the To Do List. So whenever possible I've made art pieces to fill up our walls. On the cheap of course. My favorite home bloggers at Young House Love recently published a book and in it was this art project. 

All I did was take some free paint chips, cut them up and glued them onto a piece of paper during my lunch hour at work.  Like I said, quick and easy. 

When we were at Home Depot picking out paint for our bookshelf I stuffed a whole of punch of green and yellow (Packers!) paint chip into my purse. I was a little embarrassed and kept an eye out for employees but no one said anything. I didn't even get an evil eye. I had to remind myself (and jon) that those are free! Plus I think all the money we spend at Home Depot gives me a little leeway to take 10 extra paint chips!

First I laid our all the paint chips and arrange them from light to dark in each color with help from my fellow crafty coworker. Then I used my little paper cutter (its tiny but useful) to cut the chips into thin strips. 

 

I wanted it to look like a color gradient and wanted it to resemble a chevron stripe. I used a ruler to line up the cut pieces.

I arranged them on two pieces of computer paper (green on one, yellow on the other). 

I purchased the frame from Ross for about $15 and trimmed up the computer paper to fit in the frame. 

Done. 

I loved this project because it was (almost!) free and easy. Its also something that could be adapted for anyone's preferences. You could do several colors (instead of two), change the shape and vary the thickness of the paint chips. If I could do it over again I'd used the back of the filler paper from the frame to avoid the ugly looking gap and little wrinkles in the paper. I also think the middle is a little to light and doesn't really show up on the white paper. If there is a next time I'd use a darker piece of paper. 

I'm sure one day I'll want to replace it but for right now it looks ok and goes with the Packers theme in the Man Cave.