Inspired By: Colorful Houses

Are you like me?  Do you just keep saving cool ideas on the internet and doing nothing with them?  Well, no more!!  Suzanne and I are determined to start using the ideas we save to actually make projects. 

First is this colorful house piece I found on Pinterest:

I love these simple wonky houses.  They're colorful and imperfect and the project seemed simple enough.  However, I never like to be a direct copy-cat.  After all, if you're going to copy the project exactly, you should purchase it from the original artist.  Instead, I wanted to take some inspiration from it.

We decided to use book pages as our base, rather than plain paper.  We painted blocks of color over a few pages.  (Make sure the pages are fully dry before cutting.)

I really like the way these pages look as is. However, we found that when cutting up the pages, we wished that we had used more separated colors (less blending) for clear clean cut outs.  (We also wished that we had used a slightly more diverse palette, but more on that later.)

Suzanne is way more organized and neat than I am and so she suggested creating an even border around the houses to mimic the mat in the original print.   A super quick (and reusable) way to do this is to cut a fake mat from piece of cardstock the same size as your substrate.  You can see the fake mat (it has blue tape on it) below:

We began the collage houses by cutting random triangles and squares.  Nothing too precise, as we liked the whimsical look of the original piece. We auditioned various colors and parts to see if we were cutting everything to the right scale.

We worked from the bottom layer up when it was time to glue. We began by gluing just the bodies of the houses in rows.  Then we added the doors and windows because they would end up being underneath each roof.  We used both a glue stick and Glossy Accents for the smaller bits.

I will confess that there was a point when I thought this project was a really bad idea.  But then it all came together!

Tip: Use contrasting colors for the doors and windows in order to create strong pops all around the page. (This is where more colors would have come in handy, btw.)

Overall this was a very fun piece to complete.  Was it time consuming? A bit. But I could see this as a jumping-off point for similar art.  (In fact, stay tuned over the next few weeks for some other ideas from us!)  Once I got started I definitely was driven to finish and managed to do it in a few hours.

Some more ideas to make it your own:

• Instead of painting paper, use vintage paper or scrapbook paper you have laying around.
• How about integrating some washi tape?  
• Look at your own street and mimic the houses.  This would be a great gift for a new neighbor or just yourself!
• What about a city skyline?
• It doesn't have to be houses -- these could be boats, butterflies, or even just abstract shapes.
• Try it in fabric!  This would be a super fun raw edge applique quilt.  Or even scraps of fabric glued to paper!

This is a perfect project for binge watching Netflix or streaming a great podcast and letting yourself relax and meditate with some slow art making.

Thanks for stopping by!