I’m No Artist

I’ve never purchased a canvas, nor acrylic paint, nor paint brushes.  I’ve never taken a painting class.  I don’t even know if there is a proper way of painting on a canvas.

But over the past two nights I’ve worked on a scripture board for Eliza Jane.  If you read the post from last night, I talked about the Life Verse we chose for Reynolds and how I wanted to put it on a scripture board.  Well, last year my sweet friend, Shields, painted the scripture board for Reynolds, based on a very bad sketch I gave her.  And it turned out perfectly.

This year, Shields wasn’t available to do the scripture board for Eliza Jane so I thought I’d give it try.  I am no artist.  This is my disclaimer…my warning if you will.

Over the weekend I went to Hobby Lobby and got the needed supplies.

Also, I had talked with my friend, Sheri, about kind of what I was going for with the monogram and she suggested having it done by a little shop near where she lives instead of my having to paint it by hand (Sheri, I love you more now than ever!!!).  She obviously knew my artistic challenges…

So then I searched Etsy and Pinterest for ideas for the overall look I wanted – nothing.  Sadly…  I couldn’t find anything that was my level of ability (which is basically stick people).  Also, there aren’t many people out there doing anything called “monogram verse boards”.

I told Andrew, “I’m just going to do the best I can and see what happens”.

As is the case with most of our projects, I waited for R to go to bed last night and then started my little project.  The first thing was to draw the circle in which the monogram would be stuck.

Here is one of my genius moments.  I don’t have a protractor or math compass but I knew a nail and a string with a pencil would work.  I improvised.

I used an allen wrench first, then switched to one of my newly purchased paint brushes and a phone charger.

True story.  My phone charger made a pretty good circle! 🙂

Next was to measure the center of the monogram, which was much harder than it should have been…mainly because nothing about this was transparent or seemed even.  Since my husband is a math whiz (remember last week’s post about trying to find the center of 12 5/8 and 7 3/4?) I let him handle this part.

By the end of last night the monogram was in it’s spot, and the board was grey.

A pretty good start.

Tonight, Andrew had originally planned to go to the USC football game, but at the last minute he changed his mind (sweet hubs).  Which actually helped me because I didn’t realize how long it was going to take to paint the verse on the board.  I sketched it out and penciled it in on the board to have an idea of spacing, etc.

This was really difficult.  I was really praying that it just wouldn’t turn out horribly.

I grabbed my skinny paint brush, put some paint in my little tray and started.  Shoot.  My paintbrush was too fat.  I realized this on the very first word,  “Charm”.  I’ll just tell people that I wanted emphasis on that word…

I grabbed a thinner brush…”is”.  Much better…keep going.

This isn’t a great picture, but you can tell by the look on my face that I was in the zone.  I didn’t even eat the one fry or chicken strip on the little plate until I was finished!  Ok, those technically were for Reynolds but he only wanted “cackers” for dinner…

After I’d gone back over every single letter a second time I felt pleased enough.  Andrew was so sweet, he kept telling me how good it looked (he’s supposed to say that though, right?) and how this one would mean more since I was the one making it.

The moment of truth…

I was originally going to add in white polka dots, but have since decided against it.  I’m open to ideas and suggestions that anyone might have as far as what else I could do to make this board “prettier”!