Don't Make Me Call My Flying Monkeys!: Facile Friday

I hate my bathroom! Really, it is useful but very generic in appearance and I am always trying to think of unique ways to make it more interesting.

A few years ago my mother got me this little projector that you could put small pictures under (about 3x5) and project them on a wall so that they would be larger. This in turn would allow you to trace them out and fill them in. I loved the idea of it and was, at one time, planning to do a mural on my son's bedroom wall. Notice I said "at one time"? That is code for "it never happened".

Flash forward a few years and I am still actively disliking my upstairs bathroom but have come up with an idea. I saw this artist, Timothy Goodman, who did an amazing collage of sorts on a hotel room wall in New York. This is HIS work.

Timothy Goodman's Ace Hotel room illustrations

I was seriously smitten with this idea and started to collect some of my own favorite black and white artwork to put on the walls of my bathroom. The first one I did was one of my favorite characters, Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbs cartoon fame.

I think he is the best, and the nose picking is just hilarious! The one thing that I wasn't happy with was how the sharpie markers just didn't lay down a good line on the semigloss paint so I thought that the next drawing would have to be with black acrylic paint. Go big or go home is a motto I heard once so on a day when both my husband and my son were gone, I broke out a Picasso that I adore and decided that I would take on getting it on the wall over the toilet. I tried for a while to get it right but it is really scribbley and that just made it difficult to get one piece right so that the rest could flow out of that, then I remembered that projector that I had never used. Tracer Jr. tot he rescue!

Don't get me wrong, the Tracer Jr. is quite the nifty tool but it is VERY simplistic and could only clearly project the very center of what it was enlarging. I traced out what I could see clearly and that got me enough of a good start to be able to free hand the rest and have it look pretty good. Now came the tedious part, the painting with a couple of very small brushes.

It took me about 3 hours to fill in the sketch but I have to say that I love everything about it and now, enjoy sitting on the toilet, looking into the mirror over the sink and seeing what looks to be a real Picasso right there over my potty.

I also added an east Indian inspired elephant that I found on the internet. No tracer this time but I like that each of these is my rendition of a drawing that I like.

Now, I have the beginning to what I think will be a long and "drawn" out process of finding and recreating till the space is filled to my satisfaction with fun and interesting art. Did I mention that I am also going to incorporate tin foil into the bathroom in a very creative way. I will post about it what I have figured out how I am going to use it. Till then...be creative!

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