We all love a good redemption story- I mean truly love it! Every human I know has a soft heart for a tragedy turned around whether it's a relationship restored, a huge mistake at work somehow recovered, or our favorite underdog football team coming back to make a big win. We like it when all seems right in the world and even more so when for just a moment it looked like it never would be and many of us see this new year as the perfect time for a little redeeming to start happening (looking at you here-football fans!). We set some goals and then some more goals to reach those goals and there's no backup plan because this is the year! This is the time! New Year, New Me, No Mistakes! Right...
Luckily for all of us flawed and funny humans, art is redemption and redemption is an art. Maybe you already missed the step you planned for today that was supposed to get you to tomorrow's goals, or maybe the goals you set yesterday seemed like an impossible feat today (thinking of that time spent dying on the treadmill this morning...), or maybe you haven't set any goals for yourself this year because you're a hipster and it's really just so basic- wherever you're at on the spectrum of #NewYearNewMe2018 I hope you'll see this story of technical failure and artful redemption as an example to make the most of your mistakes in 2018. Be an artist with your life, your mistakes are what you make of them!
Let's start at the beginning- supplies! I used a pre-cut wood piece for this project because it saved some time. Obviously you'll also need a STENCIL! This stencil is from our holiday collection- check it out!
Other Supplies:
- Painter's Tape
- Pencil
- Bowl (or something else circular you can trace!)
- Pen/Pencil
- Paint (color of your choice- of course!)
- Paintbrush
- A great playlist (to inspire creativity!)
One of the great things about stencils is that you can really make them your own! I decided to hand paint a wreath around this Merry & Bright stencil. Of course, if you're not feeling it we have a stencil for that too though. Stencils for everything!
Quite a few lessons learned with this project. If you're highly observant and deeply invested and interesting in this post, you may have noticed that the final product in the first picture has a black background and the picture of my supplies is a white piece of wood. If you hadn't noticed before you probably just looked. Here's what happened- I skipped the spray adhesive and may have used entirely too much spray paint. I'm not sure what I was thinking but after a strong start I looked down and it looked like I had a black ink ocean on my stencil...not good. See below:
The paint bled everywhere and dripped off the stencil and it was just overall tragic. I'll be honest- I was tempted to give up here. Throw it away. Never speak of it again (I admittedly deleted all the video footage I had taken...). Instead, I decided to see an opportunity for creativity and recovery than just a mega failure, and LUCKILY I had not used up the whole can of spray paint in my over-eager, excited, spray marathon! So I painted the wood black and pretty much did the opposite of my original plan.
The final product wasn't what I had planned, and even after all the pictures were taken and the project was over I went back and made a few more tweaks, but I'm thankful for the great lesson learned here! Mistakes are going to happen, it's inevitable, but mistakes don't have to be all bad. A little art and crafting has taught me that it is possible to make mistakes well! Check out the video below to see the rest of the details behind the creation of this piece, and if you have an art redemption story to share we would LOVE to hear about- email us!!!