Paint Me Plaid

I was recently looking through a Ballard Designs catalog and saw a great wall decoration.  What caught my eye was the soft color palette, which I immediately converted to Folk Art in my head!  So, I got out some Folk Art paint chips and started referencing colors and design and came up with this!

I gathered my supplies, the Folk Art colors, a Plaid surface that’s a cute wood sign with nine squares set inside the wood frame, which, I thought, was a perfect match for the wall hanging I saw in the catalog, and a Peel & Stick painting stencil from Simply that had some great images on it to make patterns.

I basecoated everything and set the wood squares in order as I wanted them in the frame.    Easy enough, right?

I also played a little with the stencils, and figured out where I wanted to place each image from the stencil.  This made things much easier when I started the actual painting of the project.

I dipped my #10 flat brush into water and side loaded into the Cinnamon color.  Then, I just followed the outside edge of the wood square and shaded the sides like this.

I used a very light touch with the stencil brush to basecoat the butterfly on the center square and lightly added the Cinnamon this way.

I also added a slight dry brushed edge to some of the squares on the outside edges and with an all over brushed effect on others, using Ivory White.

These Peel & Stick stencils make it very easy to make all over patterns with the smaller elements on the sheet.

I used a ruler to mark the half way point of the outer edge of the frame so I could center the stencils I used on it.

I tried to make everything look soft by using an almost dry brush to stencil with.  I also shaded the images using this technique.  This way, I kept a continuous look throughout the project.  I love how it turned out, don’t you?

Finally, I used E6000 to place the wood squares back into the frame and let it dry for the day with a fan blowing on it to be sure everything stayed in place when it was hung on the wall.

Here they are side-by-side. What do you think?