DIY Cheap Art Makeover

When I first moved to Texas I came with only my packed Sunfire and 4 bags of checked luggage that my parents brought me. My roommate and I bought a few things for the apartment, but being cheap grad students we didn’t get too many things. One of our purchases was this lovely picture from Big Lots.

I’m guessing it cost us around $10, which was the perfect price and we bought some red picture frames to surround it with. I actually found a picture of it in action on facebook:

It should be noted that these were the ONLY decorations we had in our apartment. At the time I was busy studying and trying to make friends so I don’t think I really cared. Fast forward 2 years since I moved out of that apartment and I still had the painting in its original state. I really have a hard time throwing things away or even donating them. In all actuality it was hanging up in our new apartment because I really had no desire to decorate. Once I decided to change things up the painting came down and went into storage (probably behind a bookcase or something). I had seen a lot of pins on Pinterest about making your own canva sphoto prints. A lot of them used wood pieces covered with mod podge and pictures printed somewhere cheap. I decided that using that as a basis I would attempt to makeover this painting. I had also seen a few old art redo posts, such as this one from DIY done dirt cheap, but hadn’t really found anything like what I wanted to do.

So I started off with some yellow acrylic paint I picked up from Hobby Lobby dirt cheap and a foam roller brush

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Note—a foam roller brush is not the best option for this project…learned that the hard way after spending about 30 minutes getting the art covered in yellow paint. A regular foam brush worked much better and after 2 coats I had a completely yellow canvas. I let it dry overnight and then came it was time to mod podge. I started by coating the back of the pictures with mod podge and then applying them to the painting. I then covered over the front of the pictures with the mod podge as well. From all the DIY blogs I’ve been reading everyone says the mod podge dries clear so don’t worry about covering the pictures with it. Well this is what my finished project was the first time:

If you look close enough you can see dark spots around the pictures and yes everything was dry. See what I didn’t realize was that the mod podge would leave a shiny cover, which was fine, except it looked terrible on the wall. I took it down and added a mod podge to everywhere else on the canvas and ended up with a shiny final product that I love!

The final cost breakdown for my art is as follows:

Canvas: free as I was recycling old art

Prints from snapfish: $8.84 including shipping

Paint and mod podge: $1.37 + $4.99 minus 40% off 1 item coupon =$4.37 total

Overall total: $13.21 plus about 2 hour’s worth of time

A Day at the Beach

We live about an hour’s drive from the beach yet rarely go. Actually we haven’t ever taken Nolan to the beach and we’ve had him for about a year and a half. Brad suggested we go on a Sunday morning and I thought it sounded like fun. We packed up the car with chairs and snacks and made it out of here early to try and beat some of the hot sun.

Nolan getting a good stretch in before the car ride.

I looked up beaches to go to in Galveston and decided that Galveston Island State Park would be the best for us. It was a little bit out of the way and had outdoor showers for rinsing off. Nolan tends to do better with smaller crowds and this place ended up being perfect.

Nolan was very excited once we got there.

See all that seaweed in the background—that was Nolan’s favorite part! He was rolling all through it. Maybe it felt good or it just smelled really fishy. Either way he was obsessed with it.

He wasn’t as big of a fan of the water, well really the waves.

But, he did really enjoy running in and out of the waves J

And people watching.

Overall we had a great day and stayed just a few hours until the sun started getting really hot. Nolan and Brad fell asleep on the drive home and then Nolan had to endure a shower to rinse off all the sand he picked up at the beach. It was a good daytrip and I think we’ll be back.