Ampersand Painting

Original post by Sarah @ Renewed Upon a Dream, please visit her website for more great ideas!”

I created this painting a while ago, but I realized today that I never got around to sharing it.  I LOVE ampersands.  If you haven’t noticed, I use them all the time in my blog posts.  I think it stems back from my first law-firm job (it was a bankruptcy firm).  We would use ampersands in documents all the time there.  I just got used to skipping writing out the “and” & just putting a quick ampersand in instead.  I don’t even think about it.

So, I’ve seen a lot of monogram things & numbers in art lately & I thought I could do a similar thing with my favorite little punctuation mark.  (Hum, is “&” a punctuation or a word or…. what is it exactly?)  I wanted to do a painting of my ampersand.  I am totally in no way at all a good “artist” in the traditional sense.  I can not draw or paint.  So I had to figure out a simple way to do this, and I did!  I’m so proud of how my little painting turned out.

Come to think of it, this could be a nice little Valentines Day gift for your special someone!  You could make it big or small.  Mine’s pretty small, but I love it just the same.  So here’s what I did.  First I went into Word on my computer & typed a giant ampersand.  Then I went through multiple fonts to try to find the one that I liked best.  Once I found one I liked, I printed it out & made sure to size it so that it would fit nicely on the canvas that I had.

I decided to use green paint since we are going with a bit of a green & blue color scheme right now in our living room area.  I first took my printed ampersand & used a pencil to color over the back.  Remember doing this in grade school?  Make sure the whole backside is covered in pencil where your ampersand is on the other side.  Then place the ampersand pencil side down (printed ampersand side up) on your canvas, and trace around the edges of it with your pencil, pressing hard enough so that the pencil on the back will make a mark on the canvas.

When you are done & lift up your paper, you should see a faint pencil mark, outlining your ampersand!  Now you can either paint in the ampersand, or paint around it.  I chose to paint around it.  The actual ampersand of mine is just blank white canvas, and I painted green around it.  I just used a really small paint brush & kept my hand as steady as I could while first outlining the ampersand in paint, then filling it in around it.

I love how it looks!  When you look at it close up, it looks much more textured than it does from far away.  I really actually like the texture to it.  It makes it look like a real painting rather than just a print of an ampersand.  I decided not to frame it, as I like it just how it is.  Simple.  We have it sitting on our photo shelves in the dining area.

So see, you can totally make cute art even without a vinyl cutting machine or a stencil, it just takes a little extra work! 

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