Lyric Art...Cheap, But NOT Easy.

I'm sure some of you have romance on the brain since Valentine's Day isn't too far away.  And because of this, I figure my sappy lyric art would be a fitting post for today.

A while back I made some cheap and easy art to hang on the walls of our master bedroom.  It looked great, but it didn't last long since I decided to go and re-arrange things.  That meant I neeed to get my butt moving to fill up my walls again...leading me to my cheap and easy, part 2 post.  There was supposed to be another piece of art I revealed during that post, but I just never finished it.  Part of the delay was due to my apprehension of screwing it up, and the other part was me dreading the tedious time it'd take to complete the project.

Well, finallyyyyyy I am done with it.  So it's time for me to spill all the deets of how I made some lovey, dovey art for our bedroom.

I started out with a piece of wood from Home Depot that I had them cut to size for me {basically I asked them to cut the board into two equal pieces}.

Then it was time to get my stain on.  I used Minwax's Dark Walnut stain, because it's pretty and was leftover in my basement. ;)

I reallyyy wish I had some sort of machine that enabled me to make stencils, but I'm just not that fancy. :-/  So instead, I played around with some fonts on the computer and printed out the lyrics I wanted in a large font, on some 12 x 18 paper.

Then I cut out each line and taped it onto the board.  {I used my iPhone level app to make sure things were pretty straight.}

And thennnnnn, the "fun" began.  I used a ballpoint pen and pressed firmly into the paper while tracing the outline of each letter.  It left a faint line and imprint of each letter.  I tried to photograph it, but you probably cannot tell via pictures.  Sometimes I had to hold the board a certain way so the light just hit perfectly, and then I could see.

After all that was done, it was time to use a tiny paint brush and fill in all the letters.  I found the best technique was to dab a short, stiff paint brush around the outline of the letters, and then go back and fill things in.  Of course, it wasn't alway the easiest thing to do {especially on letters that didn't have straight edges, or ones where the outline couldn't be seen 100%}, but I made it work the best I could.

For the final word "sweetheart", I turned to a gold sharpie.  I knew I wanted that word in a different color, and we all know I'm obsessed with gold lately...so instead of torturing myself with gold paint, I just traced with a marker.  It was easier than a paint brush, but it still wasn't "easy".

Okay, so maybe "easy" isn't the right word to be using.  It was pretty "easy", but man, it was a major-pain-in-the-bootay to do.  I'm all about little, tedious jobs, but this one takes the cake.  You need patience up the wazoo to finish something with this many letters.

But I am super thankful I stuck to this project because the words ring so true for me and hubby, and it's a wonderful reminder to have on our bedroom wall. :)