How To Update Wall Decor for Free

Well, hello! If you haven’t seen our entryway update go look. It’s so much brighter and gives the room a whole fresh feel. 

On the wall across from the console table, I had a piece of wall art that I wanted to update. It already has the look of planked wood so I wanted to give it a warm wood tone to contrast with the bright white of the space.

Here’s what I did! It was perfectly cute and I love what it says. I just wanted something with a graphic pattern and more contrast. Today, I’ll show you how I created the wood grain in the background and the design.

For starters, I dry brushed some grey chalk paint vertically for the entire height of the piece. Dry brushing means that I just barely dipped the brush into the paint so that the art got a light coat and so that you can see the brush strokes, helping give it a vertical grain. Find my chalk paint recipe here.

When these coats dried, I took the piece into the garage and painted and wiped some stain over the top. I used the color Provincial by Minwax and a chip brush but I could have, SHOULD have, just used a paper towel to wipe the stain on. The brush would have worked well if the stain had actual wood grain to soak into but because it was paint, it just spread out over the top and I had to rub it on evenly anyway.

When it dried and no longer smelled of stain fumes I brought it back inside and here’s what I had.

It stayed like this for a few days….I had no clue what to do next. I eventually decided on the triangles. I tried to be all left brained about it and divide the piece evenly yada yada….You can see by the half triangles that I am ONLY right brained… (disclaimer: I don’t even know if I named the left and right side correctly to prove my point.)

After I did my super accurate math, I made a stencil out of a Christmas card. Then I taped over the lines with painters tape. The arrow on the left didn’t end up being painted in. I decided I wanted to leave spaces more spaces blank.

 I didn’t worry so much about full coverage for the triangles. You can see through them but I’m totally OK with that. I worried more about the paint seeping under the tape. I pushed it down to seal the edges and brushed up and away from the tape as much as I could so that I wasn’t pushing paint underneath.

I used no rhyme or reason as to which triangles and painted and what color. The worst that could happen is hating it and painting right back over it.  I used Sherwin Williams ‘Snowbound’, the yellow and tan were just craft paints and then the green is SW ‘Hunt Club’.  Then at the very end, I added “hi” in gold sharpie. Love it. It’s happy, updated and more my style for FREE.

And because I’m so tech savvy, here’s this gif that’s very badly crafted. ; )

So what do you think? Do you have anything that a fresh coat of paint could revive? Hope this inspires you to see some potential in things that don’t work for you anymore.

Pin the image below for future reference. Thanks for reading, friends!

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