1 of 2
Photo By Isaac Harrell
2 of 2
Have you ever fallen in love with a pattern or design? Maybe it's fabric, something you saw in a book or even wallpaper. You found a beautiful image — but how do you incorporate it into your home in a unique way?
What if you could project your personality onto a piece of furniture? Literally.
This project uses an overhead projector to take a design element and add it to a furniture piece. The possibilities are endless here. You can pull a design from something that already exists in your room (I used a design from a favorite pillowcase), or you can search online to find just about any pattern or image you can imagine.
A piece of furniture that has one fairly flat side works best — a dresser, wardrobe or tabletop.
1. First, prime and paint the piece with a background color. Think about what color will work best with the colors in your design element — a high-contrast color if you want the image to pop or a color that only slightly contrasts for a subtle effect.
2. Find an image you would like to copy. You can go high-tech, scanning or downloading your image and then using an LCD projector. Or you can go low-tech, tracing your image onto transparency paper and projecting it with an overhead projector instead. (Surely you know a teacher who will let you borrow one?)
3. Project your image onto your item, then, choosing the best placement, use a pencil and trace the lines onto your piece.
4. Channel your old coloring-book days and use your color palette to paint in between the lines to create your image.* This is going to take some patience and probably a couple of coats of each color. Don't worry if you make a mistake; you can always go back and touch up with the background color.
5. Once you're satisfied, I would suggest protecting your new creation with a couple of coats of polyurethane.
*While you're sitting on the floor, painting in between the lines, you may wonder what you've gotten yourself into, but I promise the payoff is huge with this project. Your unique piece of furniture will have a hard time not stealing the show in any room.
Great places to search for images:
Or search for "free printables" on pinterest.com
Projectors vary in price from $25 to $600. Art is Fun does a good job of explaining the different options and the pros and cons of each. You can also make your own projector using a lamp, a cardboard box and some tape. You can get the instructions at Instructables.
Karen Guard is the blogger behind Darling Octopus . Each issue, she will tackle a new do-it-yourself project for R•Home.
