It happens to the best of us when we set up our first homes. Furniture, down payments, shifting and other ‘important’ things drain our finances so much so that we are left with nothing to decorate our new home with. Artwork is generally costly and while nobody likes bare walls much, we are forced to live with them till the time we save some extra dough to buy prints for our walls. However, if you have just shifted into a new house, then you can be sure that you won’t be able to save much till at least six months or more, what with one thing or the other coming up. In such a situation, creating your own art work is the next best option, and if you are a fan of customization and originality, then it is certainly the best option. You can use your imagination to create extremely cheap and affordable art pieces for your home. These pieces will not just be unique and beautiful; they will also not burn a hole in your pocket. Some ideas for creating beautiful artwork yourself are-
Frame A Fabric: Even the most artistically challenged people can easily create a beautiful piece of artwork by framing a good looking piece of fabric. All you need to do is get hold of a rich looking or colorful material, paste it on a matching or contrasting mat and frame it. Try doing this with woven cushions, they look like real tapestries, or old pieces of lace, silk or brocade to get a “tapestry” look.
Go Botanical: If you like plants and flowers (who doesn’t?), then you can create artwork using dried flowers and leafs for your walls. You can put together a collection of dried flowers, leaves and stems on a colorful mat and frame it up in a shadow box. You can also make interesting patterns with cereals and grains (think of colored beans and pulses) and put it in a shadow box. For those who are too lazy or too unimaginative to do even this much, there’s an even simpler method- Just collect leaves and flowers that you find attractive and get a colored photocopy made. You can get the copy made to a size that you like and frame this up.
Tear Up Your Books: Well, I am not talking about defacing your favorite volumes, but you can go foraging at used book or garage sales for books that have good pictures or prints of famous paintings. You can buy these books for cheap and frame pictures that you like. If you are framing small prints, then try putting them up as a collection of two or more instead of mounting single frames.
Put Useless Stuff To Use: All of us end up having plates, baskets or artwork projects that are either too precious to use or do not co ordinate with anything else that we have. The best way of putting them to good use is by using them as wall art work. So hang up plates, dishes and coasters that have lost their sets on your walls and see them transform themselves into beautiful pieces of art.
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This has some fanastic ideas that I can help expand on. If you want to with a theme for the room, why not use specific pictures or words and frame them using coloured card.
For example, I’ve taken pages from old comic books, framed them and placed them all over my room. By giving a poster or similar a frame it adds a more professional look