Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Pinterest-Inspired Gallery Wall

Pinterest is never-ending source of inspiration. Just about every day, I find something new that I want to DIY, just like this:


Or this reclaimed wood bench:


Or this scrabble letter art, which is totally "us":


Images via Pinterest

Actually, I have a DIY To-Do Pinterest board now and it grows by the day! I've been searching high and low for some kind of art to put behind the sofa in our living room - something that I won't get sick of in a week. If you'll recall, the living space is pretty sad-looking; it's the room we spend most of our time in, yet is the most disjointed and mismatched. Need a refresher?
Yikes. Needs work!
A few months ago I spotted this a-mazing gallery wall, while I was searching for a gallery wall layout that I eventually used in our dining area. Here is the gorgeous Ikea Ribba white frame gallery, from Parlour Home blog, filled with floral images by Cassia Beck, which you can purchase online in her Etsy shop. Check it out:


I am drooling over that painted brick wall, the symmetry, and heck - I even want that cat! There was a stretch of a few weeks where I was near an Ikea multiple times (because it's otherwise a 2.5+ hour drive away to reach Chicago or Cincinnati), so I picked up white frames to my heart's content. For $20 a pop and a 16" x 16" frame, you really can't beat that!

The Instagram-like effect using the flowers make the art seem traditional, yet the colors appear more modern.   In the meanwhile, I've been learning lots about Photoshop, and my new skills helped me to visualize my grey and yellow bedroom here. I thought I'd take a couple of amateur photos and see what I could do in Photoshop to mock the Instagram effect -- c'mon, we're not all iPhone users! ;) The funniest part is that most of these flowers are weeds that are growing in the empty lot across the street!

Here a couple of the prints I made in Photoshop with the help of some free Photoshop Actions I downloaded:

 


I saved them as gigantic image files and took them to Kinko's. The mat size makes the picture 11.5" x 11.5" and, just my luck, they actually have a paper size that is 12" x 18" -- printed in color, for $1.79 a page. Any larger, and it'd get printed out on the plotter, which would run me $7-$8 per page... yikes!

For a couple of hours, and $21.79 per frame, here's my completed frame gallery:




Some new pillows and a coffee table should help get this living room to a better place. I'm already playing with the idea of adding yellows and purples, since these images are so easy to switch out. What about you? Have you ever made anything you saw on Pinterest?

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1 comment:

  1. hi
    love the instagram photo wall. can you explain the process how you took them from instagram and increased the size of them in photoshop? i have tried to print the images from instagram and they are too small to get anything to blow up big.

    thanks in advance-I just found your blog and LOVE it!!!

    ReplyDelete