With all the painting projects I’ve tackled in our house, my collection of paint chips has been growing and growing. I wanted to re-use them in some way, so I decided to make a mosaic-style piece of artwork. We have a wall in our living room that had no art and not much color. All the decorating was happening on the other side of the room, leaving the room a little unbalanced, so something colorful was more than necessary.
After gathering up paint chips from no less than four places around the house, I was amazed to discover that I had a nearly inch-thick stack.
This project is actually a slightly more sophisticated variation on a simple project I did way back in 2002. I’m actually surprised I have photos of these little 6″x6″ pieces. They were given away to friends and I only made these two.
I punched out multi-hundreds of dime-sized dots. It took a while. I wanted to arrange them in a scallopy manner, so I laid out my dots face up, planning out five, six, seven rows at a time. I felt like I was playing some strange color-based strategy game, where I had to make sure the colors were jumbled appropriately.
I had a piece of wood cut (approximately 11″ x 32″) and painted it a warm red. Most of my paint chips were in the blue/green/gray family and I was lacking warmer tones, so red was a good choice of background to contrast my dots.
I started at the bottom of my wood panel, gluing down dots with Mod Podge and then putting more Mod Podge over the top, but that quickly got very messy. After maybe ten rows of doing it that way, I switched to dabbing Elmer’s Glue All on the backs of the dots and it went a lot faster after that.
To prevent myself from going crazy and so the dots wouldn’t shift too much while the glue was still wet, I glued them down just a few rows at a time, letting the glue dry in between. After they were all down, I spread Mod Podge over the whole thing.
I know you are going to think I stopped short of the top because I ran out of paint chips, but the above photo should prove I didn’t! I had originally planned to cover the whole thing, but leaving the top part red gives it some balance. I wish I would have known I was going to stop there because I would have rationed the colors differently.
I love it! I hope it reads more “artfully handmade” than “preschool craft time.”
I do think it looks better at close range. From far away it starts to look all pixely.
965
Jodi, you are totally going to win by default!
Perhaps this is evidence that no one reads my entire posts…
Erin! I read the entire post. I LOVE the artwork. And I am in love with all of your fonts. Do you but them online?
My guess, for what it’s worth, is 1,070
Katie, I will send you some links to places with free fonts. I have bought some, but most I use are free, including the ones on this site.
Just saw the comments and thought I would drop a note saying I read the entire post too! I just got the invite to your facebook page tonight and I have been completely sucked into your blog for hours. I have been doing some projects in my new house (I am in love with scrap book paper and mod podge) and you have inspired me to tackle some more 🙂 Thanks Erin.
Oops didn’t select a profile and I don’t think I signed my post. So instead of remaining a mystery I am writing again.
Love the site!
Diane
Hi Diane, so glad you enjoy my blog. I’d love to see some of your projects! Mod Podge is quite addicting.
Fabulous! I can’t believe your patience. This is definitely artistic, not pre-schoolish at all. LOVELOVELOVE!
Thank you! It took a bit of time, but it was easy.
Awww!! I had a number all ready to guess and scrolled down to see how close I was and you never have said how many it took!
Haha, sorry. It’s been more than two years since I published this post and no one has ever asked!
I just counted and there are 1039!
Erin, Love your paint chip art. It is uniquely yours, but doable for me! Thanks for the inspiration. Good thing HD is on my way home from errands…I’ll be growing a paint chip collection! Sandy in GA
Thanks, glad you like it! Good luck!
this is absolutely beautiful! what an inspiration. i’m def going to have to try something similar.
Thanks! Go for it!