Mixed Media Wall Art

Today's Mixed Media Wall Art project continues my quest to freshen up the house without spending a lot of money. I am thrilled with how it came out, and so is my husband, which is definitely a bonus!

When we moved into the house, I grabbed an old wicker fan, spray painted it black with gold accents to coordinate with the black/gold/red Asian theme I had in the room.

I never liked it. It's too small, the wrong material for an Asian theme, and downright ugly. But, it has hung there for TEN YEARS while I waited for inspiration to strike.

Finally the time has come to say goodbye. I bought five of these cheap 12x12 inch canvas panels (affiliate link, full disclosure here).

Ignore the dimensions in the description that state they are 2.5" thick. They are flat canvas stretched over cardboard. Which is perfect for what I wanted to do.

I went online and found the Kanji characters for "health", "happiness",  and "love". I cut them out so I had a template. Then I placed them in the middle of the canvas and painted over them. Nope, no tape, no glue. I just put the paper down, held it in place with one hand and painted lightly.

I wasn't worried it would bleed under the paper, since I planned to paint over it anyway in order to achieve the effect that I had actually painted the characters free hand.

I had some fabric with lovely cherry blossoms on it that I trimmed closely.

I placed them around the characters and painted over them liberally with watered down glue since I am out of Mod Podge (affiliate link).

In one corner of each panel I made three fingertip flowers. Actually, each of us made one.

I made the fingerprints look like a flower, and drew a branch with a black marker.

Then I added our initials so I would remember whose was whose. It was a last second addition, but I love the results!

For the last two panels, I cut a 14 x 14 square of fabric with the cherry blossom branch in the middle and glued the whole thing down just as I did above.

And here they are on the wall.

Since I already had the paint, marker and fabric this only cost me about $15 for the canvas panels. If you had to buy everything you could pull it off for about $25. Not bad for a pretty cool statement piece I'd say.

[Tweet "Create wall art with some canvases, fabric and paint. easy and inexpensive. #homedecor #art #crafts"]

They are currently held up with fun tak (affilite link) until I decide on the final arrangement. I can't decide if the characters should be in the middle row together or how I have it in the photo above. What do you think?