After painting our accent wall black and choosing so many black and white accessories, the room was begging for color. I brought some into the bed through floral throw pillows, but those walls were still blank as ever. I needed art and I needed color... and I didn't have much money. I couldn't afford any of the art that's on my wish list, so I decided I'd make some myself! Now, I'm no artist but I figured copycat-ing some simple modern art wouldn't be that tough.

I hunted around Pinterest for some inspiration and came upon this watercolor print that I loved:


I found a few canvases on Amazon, used other materials I had around the house and got to work. I'm super happy with how they turned out!


And it was so easy! Check it out!

Wait, you want to actually know how to do it yourself? OK, fine here's the official tutorial:

What you'll need:

• Canvas(es) (Any size really, I nabbed two 18x24 canvases for under $20)
• Paint brushes (Any flat bristles will work)
• Acryllic Paint (I had a bunch of acrylics on-hand)

I wanted the colors to reflect the bright ones found in the throw pillows, so I selected contrasting reds/pinks and blue. I tempered that with a third primary color, a dark charcoal. If you don't want the painting to be too 90s bright-on-bright, choose two opposing primaries and one main neutral to balance them out. Then pick one or two different shades of each of the primary hues. Then throw in a couple other neutrals.

 The best part about this project is that it's pretty fool-proof. Squirt drops of each of your primary colors and a few neutrals. After you've dropped your colors, spread them with your brush up and down into broad strokes. You don't want to spread the paint that thin--the paint needs to stay wet enough that it can be blended with paint in the future. I made my drops pretty large, so they produced correspondingly large streak. If you want smaller streak, just make your drops smaller.


Next, drop more dots. This time you'll mostly want to use neutrals and less in-your-face hues, but if you see that your painting is missing colors that you want to be present (like the bright pink on the left), drop those too. I could see that my original drops took up a lot of the canvas, so I made these drops small. You can play this by ear. Next, blend with these with the existing strokes.


Finally, fill in any gaps with colors of your choosing. Personally I wanted more color, so I dropped more primary tones, but if you see that you've already made your painting brighter than you wanted, go for neutrals. All-in-all the project too around 20 minutes to complete and was well worth the time.