art for home office walls | lots of diy!

It might seem like I’m procrastinating a bit on my sister’s home office redesign but we’ve been doing a lot of the nitty-gritty figuring out stuff. That sounds very official, huh! We worked out the furniture configuration and we’ve been shopping for needed items – mostly materials for the diy projects. Now I wanted to focus on the artwork for the walls – my favorite!

We decided to do a collage of framed art combined with some design pieces to cover one smaller wall. We’re going to cover almost the whole wall – top to bottom – with the art so we need a lot of pieces. I think the impact of the grouping will be great.

Here’s a peek of what I’ve done so far. Each of the pieces shows a different medium and technique but we’ve put most of them in black frames to unify them and we’re keeping within the color palette and style of the room so they’ll all work well together.

large ampersand painting – I have done lots of big canvas paintings for our home and for friends. I’ll have to do a separate post to show you some of my favorites. But this was inspired by this painting from Target. I love the ampersand shape and I thought a home office was a great place for it to live.

mixed media collages – I love doing this type of art because there’s no right or wrong way to do it. You just keep adding elements until you like how it looks. Plus they can be very personal – using items that you’ve collected on your travels or from a special occasion. I mostly use scrapbook paper, paint, images from the web, string, buttons, textured materials, shells, stamps, ticket stubs, etc.

scrabble tiles – I’m seeing a lot of decorating using real scrabble pieces. See this link. Really cute. I found these pieces at a thrift store. They had limited letters but they worked. I glued them onto an old piece of wood I had. You can also buy scrabble tiles here.

burlap covered canvas with photo – I love this! My cousin just sent me a pin of something similar and it was perfect. I was looking for something to do with a store bought canvas. We wrapped it in burlap, added the starfish, sea glass, ribbon and then a clip at the top – what a unique way to display your photos.

meaningful quotes – another easy diy. Find sayings that mean something to you, use a font that works well with your style, print it out on a nice paper and frame – easy!

art print – I designed this print and it’s in my shop, check it out here, along with lots of other art prints. My sister’s family has a beautiful brown lab and this print is perfect for their family!

watercolor initial – initials are so trendy now. In college, before computers {yes, I’m old} we would have to hand draw each letter when creating our designs and advertising. So tedious – but it was a great way to learn typography and appreciate it – and then appreciate computers! The process of these watercolors is simple: I print out the letter on my computer, trace it onto watercolor paper and then paint AROUND the outside of the letter. Very fluid and an easy technique for beginners. Check out my shop for watercolor words in similar styles.

cut paper initial – Very easy to create yourself. Print out the letter on your computer in a font you like, trace it onto scrapbook paper then cut out and place onto a nice background paper.

mutli frame with decorative paper – VERY easy and cheap! Buy a multi frame piece along with some coordinating scrapbook paper. Cut to the sizes needed and place in frames. I stamped words onto a few of the papers {live, love, laugh} for variety.

I’m sure we’ll need a few more pieces and I could go on and on with this project but I figured this was a good starting point. We’ll see what’s needed as we go. I hope you try some of these techniques or contact me and I’ll be happy to do any of these projects for you! Enjoy!