Easy Subway Art, version 2

A friend of mine, after seeing the subway art I did for another friend, asked me to make one for her newborn. I love making these, so I happily accepted. Here is the finished piece.

Before I got started, I asked her what her requests were, and to send me a picture of her nursery bedding.

I really loved the green with the brown. Momma also asked me to include a passage on the back, which I think is adorable and will totally copy when I make one of these for Ava. So after buying the wood plaque so I'd know what size to make the front, I jumped onto Photoshop and created this piece. I took the birth stats and some cute phrases, and came up with this. On my last tutorial, someone asked if I printed it on colored paper, or printed the background color on white paper. I did the second one. Luckily, hubsters is a graphic designer, and has access to a fantastic printer with poster paper, and these cost me just a couple of bucks to print. I'm sure you could do this with regular paper, I just like the thicker paper. At this point, I sent the proof to mom so she could double check the spelling and stats. Better to have another set of eyes on it. I'd hate to do the whole project, just to realize that I misspelled something.

So now we've had hubsters print out my paper, and I got together all of my supplies. I decided to do this one a little bit differently than my last one. Instead of have the printed paper go all the way to the edge of the wood, I decided to cut the printed paper just outside the words. I wanted to frame that out with a solid piece of cardstock that matched the letters. I knew I wanted to have a piece of scrapbook paper serve as a border around everything. When I was at Hobby Lobby (my FAVE store), I found this gorgeous brown and tan paper. It says things like "Word of God", "comforter", "Jesus", "savior" etc. I knew the momma would love it. The words were subtle enough that I felt with the brown paper border, it wouldn't detract from my printed words. Make sense?

So of course, I first painted the board green to it would have time to dry. I picked a sage green color from my stash that I really liked. While that was drying, I enlisted hubsters to cut out my words and the brown border. He's a lot better at stuff like that, I'll admit it. I tend to be a "go with the flow and eyeball the measurements" type of gal. Hubsters is the "measure, remeasure,  measure again and then cut" type of guy. So he got the privilege of cutting out the main pieces.

In the background, you can see my paint chip art

To cut out the scrapbook paper, I couldn't just measure from the edge, since I wanted certain words to be visible on the front. So I took my measurements, found the section I wanted to be visible on the plaque, and measured out from there. And cut it myself. What what!

Mental note: clean up a little before Hubby takes "in progress" pics. Sweats are not cute. Neither is my hair bun.

So here is where we are at. Pieces cut out, and board painted green. Remember, you don't have to paint the whole board if your paper is going to be covering it. Save yourself some time and paint. I also decided to do the same brown cardstock trim around the scripture on the back.

I first decoupaged the scrapbook paper to the board. To save myself the headache of trying to center the brown trim paper on the scrapbook paper, and then the printed paper on that, I decoupaged the printed paper to the brown trim paper, so they'd act as one piece when I decoupaged it to the scrapbook paper. Make sense?

So then it's just a matter of decoupaging everything together. Easy peasy.

So here we are, at what would have been a finished piece, minus a few more layers of mod podge. But looking at it, I started to hate the sage green paint with the almost mint green print. Blech. So here was my simple solution. Dry brushing. I heart dry brushing. It's super simple, adds so much depth to a piece, and is a life saver for things like these. I grabbed some mint green paint from my stash (I love having about a billion colors on hand so I never have to worry if I have the right color) and dry brushed it on there.

Do you know how to dry brush? Basically, put some paint on your tray (or in my case, a paper plate), load up the paint on the brush, and then dab it off on your napkin/paper plate until most of the paint is off. Then you lightly drag it along whatever you are painting. To keep it from getting on the places it shouldn't be, I just used a scrap piece of paper as a shield.

Ahhhh, much better

Now now it's just time to add some more mod podge to the front of your piece. For the back, I did the same steps, but before I decoupaged the scripture down, I glued on a piece of ribbon with some E6000 glue, and then decoupaged the paper on top of that. It made the back look really clean and finished, I like how it turned out. The back of the board had some great wood knots and a burn mark, but I didn't cover those up completely with paint, I liked the added texture.

So your finished piece would be...

The "Word of God" phrase in the lower right corner was what I wanted visible, so that was what I measured from.

Baby boy's mom loved it, which is the greatest compliment. I can't wait to see it in his room, I'm sure it'll look lovely. And she said it matched his room perfectly. Yay!