Subway Art Using the Silhouette

Now that the weather is finally nice in ND again I am starting to get some bad spring fever.  All I want to do is be outside or be on my porch reading.  I spent a lot of time on the porch with these projects: painting the walls, floor and window frames, painting a rug, and making a window seat from some Ikea shelving units.  I also put up curtain rods, made curtains, and found a chest to use as a coffee table.   Here is a look at the porch now minus the antique bottles.

This spring and summer I have a few more projects that I would like to complete for this porch including finding and making more pillows for the window seat, making some paper flowers for my antique bottle collation that is sitting on the cedar chest, finding some storage bins for the window seats, and making a gallery wall on the wall next to the front door. Today's project is a part of that gallery wall.

I like the look of subway art mostly because I am obsessed with downloading fonts.  This project justifies my penchant for downloading fonts.  The theme for my gallery wall is books and reading since the whole project was about making a nice retreat where I could read in the spring and summer.  I decided that I wanted to create a piece of art from a quote from one of my favorite books by Jane Austen.  The quote I chose is from Pride and Prejudice and I also have this quote on my custom Kindle case.

I experimented with different fonts and arrangements until I found something I really like using the Silhouette software.  Originally I was going to do this project with vinyl but I thought that using contact paper would be much cheaper.  So I set my Silhouette to vinyl and changed the blade to 3 and and the thickness to 4.  I also did a double cut because my blade is getting dull and I wanted to make sure it cut well.

I found that it was easier to weed the design when I cut it into strips.  You could also put in weeding lines to make it easier.

I used a flat canvas that I bought in a pack from Michaels. I painted my base color which was a yellowish color on the canvas and then I began applying the contact letters to the canvas with transfer paper after the paint dried.

I then painted over the contact paper with the base color to seal the edges down to help prevent bleeding of the top color under the contact paper.

I then applied the top color which was a nice turquoise color with a little bit of a gray undertone.

I ended up applying two coats of the top color.  After it dried I got to do my favorite step which was peeling of the contact paper.  It was so cool to see how crisp the letters were underneath.

There were only a couple of places that had a little bit of paint bleed.  I am so excited about how it turned out and I am stoked to get the rest of the pieces of this gallery wall together so I can put it all up on the wall.

So there you have it.  Easy peasy.  Let me know what you think!