DIY Christmas Art for Living Room Frames

I had mentioned in this post from a few weeks ago that I had planned on changing out the new frames in my living room throughout the year. Right before Thanksgiving, I got them updated for Christmas and I'm very happy with the way they turned out!

  

As I had mentioned, my inspiration for the stars came from this Pottery Barn picture. I still love the way the wood ones look, but I just had to do what I could with what I had!

I started by just using the star shape that is in the Shapes in Word. I saved it in a Word file on a flash drive and brought it to Office Depot to have it printed. They made it as big as it would go to fit on a 16" X 20" paper. I also bought some poster board and then used the star as a stencil to trace out where my star would go on the poster board. (I made 2 of these, so I did everything twice.)

I then used  a scrap piece of a cut up T-shirt to rub some Inka Gold Metallic Rub that I had picked up at Jo Ann's, on the poster board to fill in where I had traced the shape of the star.

After I had the stars filled in with gold, I replaced the star stencil back onto the paper and secured it with some blue painter's tape and then spray painted around the star with dark red spray paint. The gold rub dries very quickly, which was nice, so I didn't have to wait long at all between rubbing on the gold and then spray painting the area around it.

After I got the first one spray painted, I realized I had a slight problem. Since I wasn't careful to stay in the lines when I was putting the gold onto the paper, you could see where I had stopped with the gold through the spray paint, as it had made a dark border around the star.

See the darker red border around the star.

So I had to go back and put the gold over the whole entire paper that I had spray painted and then spray paint over the whole thing one more time so that it would have a consistent background under the spray paint.

After I went back and put gold over the whole paper.

Since I hadn't spray painted my second star, I could just cover the whole paper before I did any spray painting on that one.

My stencil is in its place and ready to be spray painted

After they were both spray painted, I let them dry flat for about 24 hours so I wouldn't end up with specks of red spray paint on the inside of the glass. I then put them into the frames and hung them up. For very little money, I now had new art for my frames. And I love them right next to our Christmas tree.

They are very imperfect. You can see where the spray paint got under my stencil and there are places where the spray paint ran on the corners because they were curled up when I was spraying them, but I kind of like it that way. I'm just going with the mentality that I meant to do it that way!

Now I'll have to be on the look out for inspiration of what to change them to next!