Painted Squares – an easy way to light up any room
I’m planning to share more DIY posts on this blog, because I love making stuff. I don’t always have the time, but now my kids are in sleep away camp, so I finally have some more time to be creative.
I was inspired by something I saw on Pinterest. Funnily, it was a picture of a bedroom from a German furniture company. I couldn’t find it on the Hülsta website anymore though.
@ Hülsta
What you need
Anyway, I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time and I bought all the canvases on sale at Beverley’s. $19.95 for seven square canvases. That was a great deal. You can get affordable canvases also at Michaels or amazon.com. I picked five different shades of blue and one accent color, a light yellow and white. After that I mixed the shades of blue with white to create even more variations. Personally, I like the Ceramcoat paint much better than the Americana.
And then you just start painting.
For most of the painted squares I needed two coats. If you paint the squares in different shades of the same color, make sure you put the paint next to the finished canvas. You might not see the differences anymore, especially if some of them haven’t dried yet.
After you finished a few canvases, you should lay them out to see if you like how it looks. You might change your mind in the process and decide to go lighter or darker or even add another color to the scheme. It’s only about what you like best.
The one on the bottom left was a square that I originally painted for this project, but then used as a present for my daughter: See my post “Painting Quotes”.
The hanging up is quite the process.
And you definitely need a helper for that. Hanging the painted squares with the same distance is quite a challenge and takes some time. Luckily I have a handy husband and he helped me with that. I painted 15 squares and wanted to hang them in a 5 x 3 rectangle on the wall, a bit less wide than the width of our bed.
We used two nails for each canvas and measured the inside of the wooden frame on the back of the canvas. On a wooden slat we marked where the nails had to go and used a measuring tape and a level to hammer the nails into the right spot. Since all the canvases are not super even and straight, you need to take some time to move them around until you’re satisfied. Same thing with the composition: We moved the different colors around for a while until we liked it. And that was last night’s result:
You can mix it up anytime.
The beauty of this kind of this kind of interior decorating project is that you can change it anytime. Acrylic paint covers pretty well and you can change the colors of the painted squares anytime or just change a couple but mix up the composition of the squares.
Have fun painting!
