but actually I have no other plan.
I was waiting for inspiration to strike
and it never did.
But when Kim posted what she did on her blog two days ago.
I decided to just use that and run with it.
So just so you know (and if you don't want to go to her blog) she posted a room picture with an octopus triptych on the wall and in the comments wrote, "It's our octopus, Beth!"
Here's why she said that:
A little over a year ago I "fanned" Kim on Facebook, and not long after she posted this: "Why does the excellently funky octopus triptych (covet!) at Plantation Design cost $5k? I mean, really."
So I went on the Plantation Design website to see what she was talking about. Here's a picture:
Then the following facebook "conversation" ensued (click on it to make it bigger if you can't read it), thus beginning my contact with Kim (if any of you wondered how that happened):
I did repaint my boys' room, and gave them the ocean theme they wanted. And while I hadn't forgotten about the octopus, I didn't have time to really sit down and do anything about it until a couple months after that. My boys were all out fishing, and I figured it was now or never. It took me a good few hours - I watched the whole of Shindler's List while working on it - something else I can't exactly do while the boys are around.
All I had to purchase was a piece of white poster board and a tube of craft paint, so my cost for this project was probably only $2, as I already had the frame and white paint. Far cry from $5,000!
Here's how mine turned out:
A few more details, perhaps? The poster board was white. I divided it into three sections (I didn't cut it, just drew two lines separating each third). Then I found the octopus image on Google, printed it out, and looked at that as a guide for drawing an outline of the octopus on the paper. Then I simply painted the negative space blue and used the same blue to outline/fill in some of the stuff on the octopus, like the mark on his head and his eyes.
Once that was done, I needed to do the suction cups. I really had no idea how to do this other than knowing they had to be round! I ended up using a q-tip to make dots on the octopus' tentacles with the dark blue, and then I added a little white to the blue and went over all the circles again with the lighter blue. This gave them depth. I would like to say, "And voila!" but it really wasn't that simple. I mean, it sounds simple, but I am really not a paper-and-paint artist. I usually can't draw to save my life (hence the octopus from Google that I used as a guide). This project ended up the way it did due to a lot of luck.
And my boys loved it. And I have to admit I was also quite pleased with it. And when I emailed it to Kim, she did as well, which was really nice. She even featured it on her blog - a super exciting thing to me that I certainly wasn't expecting.
And that was the beginning of Kim inspiring me. It hasn't stopped yet!
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