Eat, Drink, Make Word Art

We spent the last week in Upstate New York with Sam’s mom, stepdad, and brother. The family has a lovely lakeside house up there far from civilization. It’s where we got engaged last summer, and is wonderful retreat from the world where we canoe, cook, go running, eat soft serve ice cream (my obsession), and relax. But though it was nice to take a break from the kitchen overhaul (a bigger update to come within the next week, I promise!), no vacation is complete without a little DIY of course.

Sam’s mom had brought some art supplies, and so one evening I decided to tackle a simple project for the kitchen at home (I’m very single-mindedly focused on getting that done!). I knew I needed a few pieces of art for some empty wall space in there, and want to DIY it to the extent possible. I normally struggle with “word art” because I find much of it very cheesy and/or totally overdone (I’m sorry, but I just can’t hang a “keep calm” poster in my home at this point, that ship has sailed). However, I thought I might be able to tolerate and even perhaps enjoy some in the kitchen, and this seemed a low stakes way to test it.

I started with a blank canvas, and used frog tape to tape down the words “EAT, DRINK, BE MERRY,” like so:

The canvas was white, so the plan was to paint over the letters and then peel them away leaving a white silhouette of them behind. Because I find that there’s always bleed-through, after taping I went over all the edges of the tape with white paint to seal them down – that way the only bleed-through would be the white paint, which wouldn’t be visible against the white canvas (I could have painted the whole canvas while first, but I was lazy and frankly I think it looks just fine).

Then it was time to paint the canvas. I thought something yellow would work well in the kitchen (which is now robin’s egg blue), so I used a few shades of yellow and some white paint to create a bunch of different variations that I just brushed on in an abstract line pattern.

Then while it was still slightly wet, I peeled off the tape, and was left with this:

So there it is, some simple new art for the kitchen, to continue my summer of DIY art projects.

A photo of it in the kitchen plus more photos of the kitchen to come soon, along with all the details of painting, tiling, and new décor!