Thursday, February 3, 2011

Paint Chip Mosaic

I'm decorating my bedroom.  I'm keeping it pretty simple with lots of different shades of purple.

I have seen several paint chip mosaics around blog world.  All that I have seen, have been made with several different colors.  I wanted to try my hand at this, but using all the same color (purple) just different shades.


I started with a trip to Home Depot.  The bf stood next to me embarrassed, as I shoved a large amount of paint chips into my purse.  He assured me that I would be going directly to Hell for this.  I retorted, saying that at least I would be there to keep him company :)


I found an old piece of plywood in the garage.
 I removed the screws in it and gave it a quick sanding.




Using brown paint, I painted the edges.




I cut my paint chips into 3 by 3 inch squares.




Using spray adhesive, I sprayed small portions of the plywood and lined up paint chips.




In the previous photo, you may have noticed my hideous foot.
Here's the story:  I was wearing jeans and my pink cowboy boots that day.  After I painted, I slipped on the only pair of slip on shoes that were by the door.  (I normally never wear white socks with black shoes, out in public anyway.)  Then the snow way melting and the garage was all dirty and wet; I didn't want my pant legs to get all wet and gross, so I rolled them up.

Please don't judge me.  It was effective.




Back to the project and forgetting about my most lovely attire; I continued until the entire board was covered.




Me and my stylish self headed back inside and dumped some Mod Podge on top of it.

.



I gave it two coats letting it dry in between.
I used matte for a textured look.




Then I found some stain and gave it a couple coats.




I decided to give it a coat, let sit for 10-15 minutes and then blot it with an old cloth.
I repeated this until I got the effect I wanted.




This project cost me a grand total for $1.07 which was for the brown paint.
The paint chips were free (or stolen as the bf would say).
The plywood was recycled from something no longer being used in the garage.
I had the spray adhesive and mod podge on hand.
The stain was leftover from when we built our house.

I've seen similar size mosaics online for $200-$300.
So, I would say I did pretty well :)




You can see it better from this angle without the flash.









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12 comments:

  1. very cool!! you know, we brought home about a million paint chips when i was trying to decide what color to make our living room. i felt like there should be something better to do with them than throw them away once they were no longer needed for decision making, wish i had been this creative!!

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  2. This is awesome! I'm gonna start taking some trips to the paint department while stealthily sticking paint chips into my bag. Thanks for the inspiration!

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  3. I am so in love with this idea. I really like the purples.

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  4. I'm thinking you could do the same thing with scrapbook paper scraps. Very cool :)

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  5. Awesome! Love it! Where did you find such large paint squares?

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  6. Lauren: I found them at Home Depot. They are actually rectangles that I cut down into squares.

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  7. I've been wanting to do this! Thanks for the extra motivation. It looks great!

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  8. That's great! I love easy ideas like this. I wonder if I could use a large piece of cardboard? Then again, maybe we do have plywood somewhere... I'm heading out to the hardware store! :) This is definitely going into my "To Make" folder

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  9. This is awesome!!! I just have a question. did you cut off the color name of the paint sample?

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