Subway Art

A new trend that I see everywhere is subway art and I am lovin it.

My inspiration came from a very special person in my life...my sunshine, my angle, my newphew.



To this day he will only hold on to my finger. :)


He is turing the big ONE on Feburary 20th, for every occasion I try to give someone a gift that is hand made, his is going to be subwary art, this will be a gift to him and his parents. Note...I'm not skipping out on getting him the best toy ever, thats what aunts are for!



My sister Ashley, her Husband Spencer, their son Cluff


It is beyond difficult to describe this little boy that came into our life and has blessed us more than I ever thought. His personality is undescrible; there is never an hour that goes by that you don’t see a smile on his face, he is my sunshine.



My Dad is a BYU fan, but my Aunt Sas is a U of U Grad...I think I will be a baby Ute!



Ok back to the subway art. Like I said I wanted the gift to have meaning so I asked Cluff's parents the first word that comes to mind when they think about their son. I then asked this question to his grandparents, his aunt Marquie, Uncle Eric and my word, sunshine; this is my inspiration for making my first piece of subway art.

To make this an easy and time saving project it would be very helpful if you had a silhouette or circuit. I am keeping my eyes open for one that I see on sale, in the long run it would be a great investment. Unfortunately I don’t have $300 to drop on one of these life savers so I did mine the hard (but cheap) way.

I started out my project in word document. I typed the words in Ariel, Ariel Narrow and Ariel Bold. I didn’t want to do my art in the black background and white lettering because I wanted it to match his room. So I typed the words and highlighted it in blue and made the letters white, printed them out and cut out each word with straight lines.

The biggest challenge was trying to match the canvas color with the blue that printed on my words. I had to mix two blues to get close to the same color and I still could not get the colors to match, but I went with what I had. I almost started the project over because it didn’t look like the subway art I see in the designer magazines and then I realized that this is my project and I can make it unique to me.

I used a canvas panel 11x14; I like the box canvas better but I had the canvas panels on hand which is why I used the panel. Once the canvas was painted and the letters were printed out I used Mod Podge to apply the letters to the canvas. Another error I made is I used regular printer paper. If you Mod Podge paper to something it will go on much better if you use thick paper. (Using thin paper causes a lot of bubbles when you apply the paper to the surface.) After I put on the letters I used a credit card try and get out all of the bubbles and extra glue to help the paper lay flat. And last but not least applied Mod Podge over the letters to seal it and you are set to go!

You can really see the lines in these pictures, but they actually look better in person and you cant really see the color difference. These will look great if you hang them on the wall vertical, or framed in a dark brown wood, or even place them side by side.
 I really like how they turned out, now I need to make a few for my home...stay tuned!