How to Create Cheap Art for Your Home

We all want to have a stylishly decorated pad. Fortunately, there is a way to create wonderful art canvases for your home while spending relatively few dollars. I used the following method to create three coordinating art pieces on canvas for my bedroom wall.

What you'll need:

Canvas or Canvases: Choose a single canvas or multiples depending on your desired effect and the amount of wall you want to cover. For mine, I chose a large center canvas and two smaller side pieces.

Painter's Tape: This is the blue tape that is usually used to cover moldings to protect them from errant paint when painting walls. One roll will do.

Paint: You'll want to use acrylic paint for this, since you're painting on canvas. Choose anywhere from one to several colors, depending on your taste.

Paint Brushes: You'll choose these depending on the size of your canvas. No shading or other tricky stuff is necessary, so just a few brushes are needed. I bought two cheap, large brushes for covering a large area on the canvas.

Paint Container: Something to put the paint in when painting. Any little plastic or glass containers will do, you're just dipping the brush in them to gather paint.

Dropcloth: Cut up trash bags or a dropcloth for covering the floor or area you're painting, to protect whatever is underneath.

Ruler or similar: A ruler, level or something with a straight edge to determine straight lines.

The easy instructions:

Use a ruler or straight edge to mark straight lines across the canvas in any pattern you want. You'll want to think about this before you begin to prevent lots of random taping. Once you have your idea, use the painter's tape to delineate the lines on the canvas. Painter's tape is not that sticky, so you'll want to make sure it's pressed down well. If creating multiple canvases, mark all of them at once. This way you can lay out the entire piece and make sure it's the way you want it before you paint. The places the painter's tape covers will be unpainted sections of canvas once you're finished.

Lay out your paints and brushes. Choose one color to start with and paint a section of canvas. Go ahead and use the same paint to cover each section you desire to be that color. Rinse brush(es) and repeat this step for each color.

Let the paint dry before removing the painter's tape. You'll want to notice which lines of tape lie over other ones, and pull these up first. Pull each section of tape off at a 90 degree angle to prevent smudging or tearing of the tape.

Hang and enjoy!