DIY: Birds on a Wire Painting

I recently started painting, just for fun :) I created some art for our foster room, and another abstract piece for our bathroom (that's still not hung...oops). I'm far from the next Van Gogh, but painting is so therapeutic!

A few months ago, I painted a "Birds on a Wire" piece that was inspired by something I found at Target. I loved the idea but the colors wouldn't have matched our living room, so I thought I'd try to create something on my own! It was super easy!

Get yourself a blank canvas. This one happened to be from Goodwill and it was $1.50. Score.

Choose the color you want for the base and mix it up. I wanted to do brownish tones.

Start painting! I purposely did not mix enough to cover the entire canvas because I wanted slight variations in the shades of brown. Every time I mixed a new batch, it was a little bit different, and it added some dimension.

Here's the canvas after the base coat was completed. I let it dry completely before moving to the next step.

To make the wire, use a ruler. Yeah, we have one of those fancy rulers that has a built-in hold puncher. Be jealous. Draw a line in the color of your choosing - I picked white!

Let your line dry. Next come the two little birds (cue Bob Marley). I didn't take a picture of how I drew them, but I used this YouTube tutorial and it was really helpful (the bird step is about a minute in). You'll notice my birds are much less pretty than the ones in the video, haha.

Here's a close-up.

I felt like it was lacking, and I doubted my ability to draw a tree or something. Instead, I put letter stickers in the corner to spell "Love." Then, I mixed some dark red paint and used a paper towel to sort of "sponge" the red, along with some white, over the letters. Once it was dry, I used tweezers to peel off the letters and I filled them in with white paint to make it stand out. The result was this:

Sorry for the poor quality of the picture! This one was from my phone. 

I think it turned out pretty well. Nothing worthy of an art show, but it was cheap and filled the empty space above our couch! The thing I like about this painting is its potential for modification. I think it would be super cute with big birds and baby birds, with the word "Family" underneath or something. And if you're more artsy, the details you could choose to add are endless! 

Happy painting!