Art for the Kid's Rooms.

My kiddos are getting their bedrooms made over as their birthday presents this year. Every year we try to give them something other than a bunch of toys since they get this from everybody else. We usually do something big like last year we made them a playground and bought a new swing set to go in it. This year I knew right away that they would want new rooms. Well Sweets at least, Bug is still too little to tell us what he wants. When we moved into our house a year and a half ago we didn't do anything to their rooms, just moved the furniture in. They are both painted a boring pale tan color and the walls are bare. In our old house their rooms were so cute, we had really worked hard on both of them. So it seems like it is finally time, Sweets is about to turn five and start kindergarten and Bug will be two and moving to a big boy bed this year. So Sweets picked her idea out all on her own of course. We were at Lowes one day looking at paint samples (my kids love to do this for some reason) and she found a little booklet of ideas. In it were some of the loudest paint colors I have ever seen (and I painted my last living room orange). However there was one that was painted aqua and lime that she immediately fell in love with. This I can do, so it was decided. As for Bug I know I want to paint the walls orange and accessorize with brown, sky blue and lime green and of course his room will revolve around trucks since he's totally obsessed. So the big thing about doing their rooms is that I am determined to do it on a small budget and have it look great. I am going to post here exactly what I spend so that everyone can see that it's possible. For my first project I chose art. I saw in the Sunday paper a few weeks ago that Big Lots had canvases on sale for three dollars a piece so I went and bought three for Sweets room (11x14) and one for Bug(12x12), I also bought a much larger one for Bug's room(18x24) The 4 smaller ones were three dollars a piece and the larger one was seven. For Sweets I went with a woodland animal theme and drew up some different images till I was happy. I ended up with a skunk, a deer and a pair of owls. For Bug I used Alexander Henry's Traffic Jam fabric as inspiration for the large painting and a photograph of a Ford Econoline that I found through a Google search. I used acrylics that I already had so that part was free. My technique is one that even someone with no skills could probably do with success. Basically I draw my image onto the canvas with pencil and then trace it with a sharpie, when you paint over it you can still see the sharpie lines so you have something to follow, then it is pretty much just like coloring in a coloring book but with paint. After I have painted my image and it dries for a few days I go back and go around all the lines again with black sharpie to make it pop. For the big green one with the cars I just retraced the images in three shades of sharpie. The biggest thing to remember is to let the paint dry in between each section and before tracing and outlining with the sharpie. If you aren't artistically inclined you could very easily trace an image to start with.