DIY artwork for the Captain’s bedroom

We decided early on in the pregnancy that we would not find out what the baby’s gender was so when thoughts turned to the nursery, we had to stay neutral.  We opted for lemon and white to decorate the walls of the room, boring perhaps but a colour explosion could follow when baby arrived.  We didn’t want a single theme or a room too babyish which would be grown out of too quickly.

After things had settled down following Jack’s arrival, I decided to get a little creative and took on a little DIY project.  It took me a couple of weeks to complete because I barely had any spare time.  You know how it is!

The idea was to create a unique piece of artwork which was a quick and cheap way of personalising my boy’s bedroom.  I considered what things a little boy may like to play with and decided I couldn’t go wrong with Lego, cars, dinosaurs and drawing pencils.

Materials and costs:

• Measuring tape, ruler, pencil, paintbrushes and Stanley blade
• White Foam board – free (leftover scraps from work (you could use thick white cardboard))
• Tester paints and masking tape – £4 from Homebase (I already had some other paint at home)
• Lego – £3.50 from Wilko (tub of own brand pieces)
• Pack of cars – £1 from Poundland
• PVA glue – £1 from Poundland
• Superglue – £3 from Homebase
• Masking tape – £1 from Poundland
• Pack of Dinosaurs – £2.50 from local toy shop
• 2x packs of colouring pencils – £2 from Poundland
• Scraps of paper / newspaper

How I did it:

I wanted my letters to be symmetrical so had to choose measurements carefully.  The width was decided by the length of the pencils.  The height of the letters did not matter.  I drew out the letters onto the foam board and cut them out using a Stanley.

The ‘J‘ was the easiest and quickest to make and the only letter that Daddy was interested in helping with.  No surprises there as it was Lego.  The Lego pieces were assembled ‘masterfully’ by Daddy and then glued down onto the foam board.  Didn’t take long at all.

The ‘A‘ was probably the toughest to make.  I had decided on a car and road theme and sourced pictures from the web on road layouts.  I used a Stanley and ruler to cut strips from the masking tape to create the road markings which were laid out onto the foam board.

The road was then painted with a grey tester paint and left to dry.  The masking strips were then peeled off to reveal the white road markings.  The cars were then glued to the road using superglue.

The ‘C‘ was super easy but took the longest.  The foam board was covered in papier mâché using old newspaper and PVA glue to give the effect of a rugged terrain.  It took a while to dry but the result was good.

The surface was painted using a small tub of green tester paint (land) and some blue paint (river) which I already had leftover at home.  Once dry, the dinosaurs were glued on using superglue.

The ‘K‘ was nice and easy.  I sorted the pencils so that the colours were sparing and simply glued them to the foam board using superglue.  The foam board had previously been painted to match the wall colour using leftover paint so that there was no white board showing between the gaps in the pencils.

 

I really enjoyed creating this artwork for Jack’s bedroom and as you can see it was nice and cheap to make and bespoke too 🙂

Lisa x

 

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