Hardboard Nursery Art

I was inspired by Lil Blue Boo to make a piece of nursery art for my soon-to-be-here grand-nephew. Great-nephew? hmmm Not sure which one it is. Either way it makes me feel old. I can hardly believe my little baby niece is old enough to be married and having a child. Crazy how quickly time flies!!

Anyway, I've gotten off topic. Here and here are examples of Lil Blue Boo's nursery art. I don't think mine turned out as fantastical as hers do...but then again this is the first one I've done!
It really wasn't terribly difficult. And I don't think it takes a huge amount of skill (Can you hold a paintbrush? Use painters tape? How about cut ribbon? Know how to squirt out glue? Then you can do it too!! ;-) )

The supplies I used to construct my experiment piece of art:

Paint
Paint brushes
Paint pens (silver and black)
Painter's tape
Ribbon
Letters printed from the printer
Little wooden letters
Glue (hot glue gun, or E6000, my personal favorite)
Canvas (In this case chip board but you could also use regular canvas or a piece of wood)

Base look of canvas was done using brown, green, and tan paint squirted on randomly and then sort of blotched/blended together. To do this I used the largest paintbrush I had and squished it into the paint bouncing around the canvas here and there. Really super duper sloppy. Let mostly dry, then add a little more of whatever color you think it's lacking (in my case, "pure" green, and "pure" brown), and blotch all over. Then let the second layer mostly dry, and do the same process one more time. Unless you're happy with how it looks after the second layer!

Next put painters tape down in a random way to tape off areas you don't want to get painted. Then paint the areas you do want to get painted.

blue painters tape, wet brown, green, and tan paint

Remove the painters tape when the newly painted areas are at least 95% dry. Make sure to practically lay the tape flat on itself to get a crisp clean line.  Add embellishments as you like. At this point I used a medium tipped silver paint pen to add dashed lines and dots, glued on camouflage ribbon making sure to glue the ends on the backside of the chip board, then painted on a leaf-less tree.

The start of a first sergeants patch being painted on.
Add more embellishments while the paint dries. I used clip art in Word for the tank, and found the owl online, and printed them both in color. Then I used the medium tipped silver paint pen to write in some words.

 

I finished off the sergeants patch using a medium tipped black paint pen, wrote in a few more words with the silver paint pen and then worked on the name. For the name I used a pencil and traced around the letters onto the chip board using the letters I printed off the computer as well as wooden letters I bought for pretty cheap at Wal-mart. I painted the letters on the chip board in with a fine tipped black paint pen, then traced around that with the medium tipped silver paint pen. After all that was dry I painted in the larger letters with blue paint so they would stand out. What you can't see is that off to the side I was painting the wooden letters the same green that I used in the blotching process, and for the one stripe.

I attached the painted wooden letters with some glue, added in some more words with the black fine tipped paint pen, and touched up all of the black outlines of the blue letters. Once that was dry I added in some silver dots in a sort of patterned fashion. If I had brads, I might have added those to all of the major points of the letters as if they were being held up by them. Also added in: a black painted in "picture corner" in the lower right hand corner. Why? Because I accidentally got black paint on my hand, and then smudged it on the picture. Oops!! Oh well... I think it looks cute.

A close-up of the letters. It's kinda hard to tell, but the E is up off of the canvas.

A close-up of the owl in the tree and the striped area.

So...There you have it! My first attempt at a personalized hardboard nursery art piece. I hope my niece and her husband like it! Her husband probably will since there's military stuff on there. ;-)
This is the perfect personalized gift to give to someone expecting a baby.