Create Art to Match Your Home Decor

Beautiful beds are not too difficult to find these days. Coordinating bedding is also quite easy to find. But once you have a well-put-together bed with coordinating pillows, what do you put on the walls? 

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I personally love the quilt bedding at World Market and I’ve shopped there for both my guest room and master bedroom bedding. Home stores provide such easy and affordable ways to put together a beautiful bed with just adding solid color pillows.  (By the way, if you love the steel gray chunky knit pillow here on my guest bed, Rinne made it and she sells it on our Etsy store.) Now, first the guest bedroom project…

Artwork for your home
Guest bedding

I’m an artist and I’ve got my home filled with my original artwork pieces, but I’m here today to encourage you that you can make your own artwork too—no matter your level of experience. You don’t have to be an accomplished artist to do it! This first example from my guest room doesn’t have a lot of step by step pics because I did this a couple of years ago not knowing I might want to someday show the process.  

I would first recommend to simplify a design from your bedding and you can compose an inspiring piece for your home. As inspiration, take one flower or just the colors from your bedding to paint your canvas. If you’ve never painted before, let me reassure you that there’s no one right way to do it. You can purchase blank canvases from a craft store, some inexpensive paints, a brush or two, and in no time you can have original artwork too. 

The canvas I painted for my guest bedroom is the perfect example of the imperfect. I first painted the canvas with a base of bright greens and yellows, paying no attention to keeping it neat, just using strokes to fill the background with color. The brushstrokes make it more interesting and there’s no way to mess it up. (If this is all you can handle, then just leave it with this first step for a background.) This is a great first step to covering that big white canvas which can seem intimidating. Next, I painted a few of the flowers and one of the stems in the corner from the bed quilt design. Focus on the shapes within the flower and just try to copy shapes.

Artwork for your home
Photo of artwork to plan the text layout.

Then, because I’m a graphic designer, I like to take a photo of the canvas at this stage to plan the text. I can then import this image into software on my computer and plan out the text over the image on the computer. I use professional Adobe InDesign software. This is the design for the text that I made using one of my favorite verses…

Artwork for your home
Colossians 2:6-10 layout plan.

Even if you don’t have access to computer software for layout, you have options. Either draw by hand, download a free printable you might find on Pinterest for the verse/wording that you want to add to your painting, and of course, you don’t even have to do words. Here’s the text overlaying the image on my computer layout…

Artwork for your home
Computer text layout over image of painted canvas.

Don’t worry about painting words. With this particular canvas I used a white chalk marker to handwrite the verse. I also have a technique for transferring computer printouts onto my canvases. (Read on and you’ll see below that the painting I did for my master bedroom I used that technique, which gives a much cleaner result. Lucky for you, I also assembled a VIDEO that shows you how to do it.) And as you can see from my final artwork, I didn’t use the transfer method. With freehand writing, I didn’t stick perfectly close to the plan but it still turned out just fine.

Artwork for your home
Handwritten verse using white chalk marker.

If you’re still feeling a bit overwhelmed by the thought of this, you can watch my VIDEO that shows all the steps of how I created a matching painting for my master bedroom that included a transferred and hand-painted verse. 

Artwork for your home
Let’s match this pillow sham!

Now for my master bedroom project…
I had bought a solid off-white duvet coverlet at Bed, Bath and Beyond (that I found on clearance, whoo-hoo!) and paired it with pillows and shams from World Market. To make the artwork for my master bedroom, I used the flowers from the pillow shams as inspiration. I also chose a verse from Song of Solomon to paint on the canvas. This was my plan for the layout…

Artwork for your home
Planning the image and verse on the computer.

And here was the final result….

Artwork for your home
The final result.

MOMMA’S TOP PAINTING TIPS:

I would recommend starting with flowers and leaves. They can be created with simple brushstrokes and always look nice. The key to making your painting ‘match’ the picture or item you are trying to copy, is to only look at the shapes in the image you are copying. For example­—don’t TRY and paint ‘a leaf’ (or what you THINK a leaf looks like); instead, notice that it may look more like a water droplet and paint a water droplet shape. Notice that things from nature are not all one color. Paint one color for the initial shape and then add highlights of color on top of that shape….may be just a line or a dot is all you need. You’ll be amazed how it will look ‘more real’ and stylized when you just concentrate on the shapes and colors.

Watch my demo video!

Be sure to head over to our YouTube channel and watch the complete making VIDEO of this “I found him whom my soul loves.” painting. I’ve compiled, edited and commented to give more detailed instructions for the whole process. It took me about 8 hours start-to-finish to produce this artwork (don’t worry, my ‘how-to’ video is edited to be only 27 minutes).

Hopefully, I’ve inspired you today. Be sure to sign up for our latest blog posts. And we’ve been known to offer free printables—so signing up for our newsletter is always a good idea if you want to be in the loop for what we’re up to!

I’d love to hear about your successes and failures with this project. Comment below and if you have any questions, contact me.

Be blessed,
Momma

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