Create Your Own Artwork

There is a theme with all the artwork in our house. It was all cheap (surprise) and is almost all black and white. I am just drawn to it for some reason.

If you've never visited the Graphics Fairy its a treasure trove of free clip art and printables. The link is to the images I used in Tate's room. I think I went through just about every single black and white clip art there is on the site and these were my favorites. I was in dire need of some art for the walls in Tate's nursery and the budget was as close to $0.00 without going over. Once I had the images I wanted to use I took some thick resume paper (because we had it laying around) and printed it but the paper was still to pristine looking for the effect I wanted.

We had plain white resume paper laying around. Please excuse the packaging-Diesel was working on his resume.

I experimented with tea and coffee staining the paper. I initially used the leftover coffee from my morning brew- the coffee was too dark and uneven for the look I was going for so I brewed up some strong black tea and tried again.

I soaked the pages in the tea for about 10 minutes making certain to cover the entire paper evenly.

Then I placed them on cooling racks over kitchen towels to dry while I was at work.

When I came home the pages were dry but slightly wrinkled so I lightly ironed them with the towel over the top.

Final product- perfectly aged paper ready for printing! There is a more noticeable difference in the two papers in person. The camera doesn't pick it up very well. I then just fed the paper into the printer through the bypass tray (the stiffness of the paper jammed my printer's regular feed) and printed out my images.

Linking to:  

It's a Hodgepodge Life

Simply Designing

Watch Out, Martha!

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