Fun with Plak-Its

If you're like me and still clinging to some of your old first-apartment-post-grad wall art (you know what I'm talking about--the Plak-It Claude Monet Water Lillies, that framed canvas print of a dog with an Afro that you bought at Urban Outfitters), here is a fun project for you. As long as you can stomach painting over that mounted black-and-white poster of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's that you know you're never really going to put back up on the wall, you can turn these dime-a-dozen reproductions into beautiful, original pieces of art.

This is one of my favorite things to do because it is cheap and easy...and, hey, it's environmentally responsible, too! There are just two steps to this project:

1. Get out your white paint and paint over your old "art." Wait for it to dry completely.
2. Decide what you want your new art to be. You don't have to be an artist for this. Find a stencil you like on-line, print and enlarge it if necessary, and simply fill it in with black paint. Or, you can write a word or a line from a favorite poem or song. I did this one free hand, but you could buy an alphabet stencil at a craft store and get a similar effect. So simple, yet, I guarantee you, much better than what was there before...

For the silhouette art of my family below, I cut around photographs of my family members' faces where they were in profile, then blew them up to the size I wanted them. I traced around the pictures directly onto the painted Plak-It board, then filled them in with black paint. I really wanted the piece to have some texture, so before I painted it white, I basically used up all my ugly colors of acrylic paint by slapping them on haphazardly and unevenly and using a metal spatula to chunkify the paint even more. Then, once it was completely dry, I painted over it with a thick white interior wall paint. You don't have to take this extra step, though, if you don't mind a smooth finish.

There you have it...original art in a day or less! Natalie Vaillancourt...this one's for you (I know you have some Plak-Its with motivational quotes lurking in a closet somewhere)!