Painting From a Greeting Card

In my last post I showed how I hung an inexpensive Autumn seasonal painting on a piece of 32” x 40” plywood.  This Christmas painting is attached with metallic ribbon to that same piece of plywood, strung through the holes and tied in the back.  See my previous post for details of how I prepared the plywood.

The idea came from a tiny gift tag.  It sparkles with glitter and measures 1½ inches in diameter - very small!  I’ve saved it for almost 8 years thinking I would use it as inspiration some day!

I did a sketch on a large 30” x 40” piece of old matte board.  Not too detailed.

I chose pastel chalk because, unlike watercolor, It doesn't require as much planning ahead.  It's fast, and I could cover my mistakes instead of tediously lifting them off.  A large piece of watercolor paper would be costly – I wanted cheap!  I didn’t have to stretch it, mount it, cut mattes, or frame it with expensive moulding behind glass.

Then I covered the whole scene with “snow” (dots of white chalk) which hid a lot of mistakes, and sprayed the whole painting with several coats of Aqua Net hair spray, letting it dry between coats.
  

I brushed a little Mod Podge (waterbased sealer, glue) to the areas of snow I wanted to highlight and sprinkled a little glitter over it. 

The white gingerbread frame was made of left-over foam core.  I made a template from scrap paper as a guide and cut the foam core with an exacto knife. Using Craft glue, I stacked a couple layers of foam core spacer strips around the edges, directly to the plywood to give space between the painting and the finished “frame”.  I glued the gingerbread frame on top of the spacers.

Here you can kind of see how the glitter sparkles from the light of the Christmas tree when the room is darkened.

I probably spent a total of 20 hours on this project.  It’s an easy one that looks festive even if you aren’t a good artist!