Our Texas art

Our master bedroom has been pretty devoid of any real decoration since we moved in three and a half years ago. We have talked about finding some sort of art or something to hang above the bed but it has never been a high priority. One day in mid August, I was bored so I started searching etsy for inspiration. I found this, which I thought was pretty cool:



But this thing was tiny, I think it was less than one foot long. We wanted something that was 5-6 feet long. I showed it to Kelly and he agreed that it was pretty cool so I suggested making one ourselves. Kelly had the idea to use pictures of Texas landscape or architecture since we live in Texas. I searched all over the internet looking for cool postcards or pictures we could buy for cheap. I ended up using some royalty free photos from stocklib.com. I payed $3 per jpeg, which allowed me to download it and have the rights to the photos. So I can print them out as many times as I want, change them, etc. So the first thing I did was to weather the photos. I used photoshop and a free texture that my cousin in law (thanks Carol!) e-mailed me a long time ago to turn this:



into this:



So now that we had the pictures, we had to figure out what we wanted to do with them. It started out that we were going to make it look like my inspiration picture. We were going to either buy an old piece of weathered barn board or we were going to try to weather it ourselves. After thinking about it for a week or so, I decided that would be boring. It would be just like a giant picture frame. I wanted something more, something that would make it really stand out and be unique. I ended up getting busy with other projects, like Pages We've Turned and Kelly got busy working on the landscaping so we just set this aside and didn't give it much thought for awhile.

Then one day, I had the idea to use corrugated tin in some way. The project took many turns in my head as I worked through logistics until one day it dawned on me to use magnets to attach the pictures to the corrugated tin. I finally had it all figured out in my head how I wanted it to look but we had to sit on it for another month because Kelly was so busy at work that we didn't have much time to work on it. But over the past week, we got the chance to get started and it has come together exactly like I had pictured it.

First I used some spray adhesive to mount the 5x7 photos on thin pieces of plywood to make them more sturdy. Next, we cut out the wood for the frame, making good use of Kelly's newish miter saw. Then we trimmed down the corrugated tin. We stained the wood frame, mounted magnets on the back of the pictures, and put it all together. It was very easy to make after I explained, re-explained, and drew pictures for Kelly to understand what I wanted. It will also be easy to switch out the pictures if we get tired of them.







Our Texas art includes the Texas flag, railroad tracks (because they're everywhere down here), a Texas Longhorn, the 360 bridge in Austin,



the Alamo, a windmill, a Cowboy roping cattle, a fence post with lasso and hat, and a pumpjack. I learned that those things are called pumpjacks through this project, I always just called them oil drills.



Now I can get going on my next project, seems like I always have a few going in my head.