Nursery Projects - Fish Canvases

So as I mentioned in previous posts, I was considering doing some DIY projects for in the nursery. We really wanted to hang pictures of fish and other sea creatures in the nursery. We looked around online and found some cute prints we liked but didn't want to spend the money to buy them, so I thought I would try to make them. This idea is primarily to save money, not because I have great art skills or know what I'm doing with paint at all. But I tried so here goes my first art project.

I really had no clue what I was doing so I just started. First, I printed out some pictures of fish and other sea creatures that I thought were cute. Then I bought some blank canvases and paint from Hobby Lobby. I started out with just a few colors but eventually had to go back to get more. (In hindsight, I should have just bought the primary colors and went from there...duh!) I did end up mixing a lot of colors eventually. Then I tried to draw the animals first on paper and then on the canvases. It really was a lot of fun. Even though I'm sure my artistic skills are not super, I had fun! Here is how it looked when I first started...

I ended up doing each canvas in 2 stages. First I did the background and then go in and fill in the details once that first coat of paint had dried. Here is a shark outline after his first coat.

Here are a bunch of the animals after their first coat of paint to do the biggest areas.

After attempting to paint eyes on these poor fish, I realized I was no good at it. So I bought some googly-eyes and those worked much better.

Later, I realized that the fish looked pretty blank with their white backgrounds so I experimented and doodled some things in the backgrounds.

I eventually bought some smaller canvases thinking the fish would take up more space on those and less space on the wall and hopefully look cuter.

My mom helped me hang them and we decided to hang them over the changing table. Here's the finished product. These aren't all the ones I painted but these seemed to be the cutest and the sizes matched to make the collage.

Here are some up close shots of each side.



I think they turned out pretty good for the most part. I have a few more that didn't make the cut. I might try to find somewhere to put them in the nursery still or just trash them...not sure yet. It was neat working on a project for the nursery. I had a lot of fun. It may not look professional but it was a heck of a lot cheaper than ordering prints!