Our Staircase Photo Gallery Wall - Finally Complete!

Way back in 2011 (holy cow, was it really that long ago?), I shared the reveal of the gallery wall in our staircase. It only spanned one wall at that time, and I figured eventually I'd fill up the other wall but it's never really been a priority. To say we've had some other projects on our plate since then would be a severe understatement. 

Below is a quick reminder of what the existing gallery wall looks like. (If you want to see a blast from the past, you should check out the first reveal post to what the wall color used to be!) The frames are filled with photos from vacations, but they were starting to feel pretty outdated.

Seeing as how we've taken quite a few other vacations over the years, I recently decided it was time to extend the gallery to the opposite wall, down the stairs that lead to our basement.

I wanted to take the same approach, which was a variety of different frame designs and sizes that would all be painted white or ivory. A couple weeks ago as I drove by an At Home store, I decided to pop in to check out their frame selection. There was conveniently a clearance event taking place, so I ended up filling my arms with as many frames as I could hold — some of which weren't on sale, but still cheap. I bought 9 frames for a total of $58, which felt pretty reasonable.

Vintage Sea-Inspired DIY Wall Art

I know. The title of this post is kind of a mouthful. But that's the best way I can describe this project. And since the last project I blogged about was admittedly kinda lame (albeit functional), I promise this one will make up for it! Consider that your warning for a long post with lots of pictures ahead.  :)

This is one of those things I've had on my to-do list for several weeks now, but I finally had the time, motivation, and materials to get it done over Memorial Day weekend. One of the other reasons it took so long to get started was that I didn't exactly know how to bring my vision to life. I hadn't seen any specific examples of what I wanted to do. But I'm happy to say that it turned out beautifully in the end! And, I have to say right off the bat that the total cost was less than $5!!!

Let me rewind just a bit. It all started when I was thinking about how to decorate our hall bathroom. We have 10-foot ceilings and there was a large expanse of wall above our towel rack just crying out for attention. 

I'm really digging beach/sea-themed decor right now, and after some searching I found these vintage-looking sea printables via Pinterest. I knew they would be perfect, and the colors would look great with our bathroom walls (which are painted Behr Mojito). I printed them out on regular paper on a laserjet printer (*cough cough* at my office). I'm not even sure if the images were high-resolution, but they looked pretty decent to me once printed.

DIY Contemporary Canvas Artwork

In case you haven't been following along lately, we recently painted our master bedroom and bathroom. I in the process, I had to remove the decorative vinyl lettering which had lived on the wall above our soaker tub for several years. But I already had a plan for what to replace it with, thanks to Pinterest.

The Pinspiration:

[via Two Girls Being Crafty]

This was actually an idea I'd pinned at least a couple years ago (so don't give up on those old pins; you never know when you'll get motivated!). I thought the above DIY version of a World Market painting was pretty awesome. And from the looks of it, pretty foolproof. So I set off to Hobby Lobby in search of the materials:

• Canvas (I chose 22" x 28" so as not too look too underwhelming on the large wall)
• Ivory spray paint
• Paint marker (I got a Sharpie oil-based marker in brown)
• Round foam pouncers
• Acrylic paints (I got the exact same colors listed on Two Girls Being Crafty, because I liked hers so much. And let's face it, it made my decision-making process much easier.)

All in all, I was able to get everything for under $30.

Personalized Nursery Letter Art

You may be wondering why I would be doing a project for a nursery. Well..... I have some news to share......

Just kidding! No, we are not having a baby. However, a couple of our good friends just became proud new parents of a baby boy (three weeks ahead of schedule). I knew I wanted to do some sort of DIY project for their gift, and I had been thinking along the lines of a personalized photo frame.

Then, I came upon the perfect idea while visiting Hennessy House. I wish I could take credit for myself, but I have to give Sarah all the props; this girl has creativity oozing out of every pore! Seriously, you should see her artwork. Normally I am both impressed and intimidated by her talents, but this letter art actually seemed like something I could attempt to re-create myself.

Basically, the idea is to trace a bunch of different stencils to create the shape of a letter. For a good, detailed tutorial, just check out Sarah's post. In her case (below), she used it as a wedding gift.

via Hennessy House

I, however, was visualizing it in a nursery. Since my friend's nursery has what I would call a sophisticated/modern jungle theme (it's really adorable), that made it pretty easy. I had no trouble finding various elephant, giraffe, and hippo silhouettes on Google Images. I also used a photo of the wall in the nursery to get the silhouette of the simple tree that also matches the tree in her fabrics. Then I printed off all the silhouettes in a variety of sizes.

The baby's name is Elijah, so I found a nice chunky font (Berlin Sans) for my letter "E"and blew it up to about 700 point size for an 8x10 frame. After tracing the outline of the E onto tracing paper, I proceeded to trace my silhouettes inside the letter. It was kind of like putting a puzzle together, trying to decide where they fit best. And although it was time-consuming, I thought it was pretty fun.

I wanted to make a couple different versions to see which one I liked best, but ran out of time and just went with my first attempt. Here's what it looked like as outlines only:

Then, I scanned in the tracing paper, printed it off on regular white paper, and colored in the silhouettes with a black Sharpie. (You could also just use the fill tool in Photoshop to color in the outlined shapes, but this way felt more "handmade.") Here's what it looked like when I scanned it in again:

In Photoshop, I erased the outline of the E, darkened the silhouettes by adjusting the levels, and just cleaned up the image in general. There was also a little blank hole that needed filling, so I added the date of Elijah's birth.

I found this silvery frame at Walmart, which I spray painted with Rustoleum American Accents satin finish in Iris Blue.

Then I just printed out my letter art on matte photo paper, and voila!

I think Sarah's version looks better, but overall I'm pretty happy with mine. This is such a great gift idea -- inexpensive, yet it still requires effort and creativity. With that said, you don't have to be an artistic genius, just have a little bit of patience.

And the season of giving continues...

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Motivate Me Monday
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Amaze Me August
Look What I Made! (Creations by Kara)
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What I Made Wednesday (Sweet Peas and Bumblebees)