DIY Shareable Original Art Gallery Wall

*This post was sponsored by CanvasDiscount.com. All opinions are my own.

For those of you who didn’t know, I studied studio art in college. I focused on drawing graphite portraits, but also did a little bit with printmaking, sculpture, woodworking, and painting, among other things. It was honestly one of the best times of my life, and I’m glad that I’m able to feel a sense of gratitude for the last year spent largely stuck at home because it gave me a chance to tap back into my love for 2D art.

I’ve been thinking about ways to make the most of the new pieces I’ve created, and how to also preserve the drawings and paintings that I made back in school over 10 years ago. It’s really important to me that I have digital versions of my work so that they’ll live on—conceivably forever!

I recently came across CanvasDiscount.com, and realized pretty quickly that it was the resource I had been looking for. They offer lots of different custom framed photo and canvas print options that I could use to reprint my art on, and I could also send the files along to family and friends if they ever wanted to display any of my drawings and paintings in their own houses.

Just think about the possibilities here, even if you aren’t a passionate wanna-be artist like I am. You could use CanvasDiscount.com to frame your children’s artwork, reprint a favorite vintage painting that got lost, or send framed blown-up versions of your grandmother’s handwritten recipe card out to all the cousins in your family. There’s so much you can do! Let me show you how I did it. Oh, and don’t miss the coupon code that I share at the end of the post.

First, I want to demonstrate how this concept works with some new art. I had a pile of miniature canvas boards sitting on our shelves, and thought they might be perfect for this project. For the paint, I used interior wall paint that we also had in storage, that way I could avoid the tedium of mixing acrylic paint. I wanted to show you the absolute quickest application possible!

So, all I did was pour the mixed paint onto disposable paper plates, then I whipped up three small abstract paintings. I did my best to simplify the look in case any budding artists out there want to try something similar. Just have fun with it! Use colors that make you really, really happy, and don’t think too much. I spent maybe half an hour on these paintings right on the kitchen countertop, and it was a blast. Art, to me, is like a breath of fresh air. Seriously! It’s so relaxing.

After the paintings had dried completely, I set them on scrap cardboard in the brightest room of our house, and then I took quick photos of the art with my phone. I love that I was able to edit out any parts of the paintings that I didn’t like using a photo editing app on my phone (I used Lightroom). I also used my phone to lighten and brighten the colors so that they were nice and crisp. To finish up, I cropped the photos down using my phone’s camera app so that none of the scrap cardboard was showing around the art piece.

If you’d like to try these pieces of art in your own home, click here to download the leaf print, here for the abstract curved lines art piece, and here for the abstract arches print. You can download those to your computer, and then upload them to CanvasDiscount.com, just like I did. Here’s a side-by-side comparison below of what one painting photo looked like before and after editing in my phone.

After documenting the three little paintings, I went around the house and also snapped some photos of my old drawings, as well as one vintage portrait painting that I wanted to make sure we never lost (I decided to have it printed in black and white from CanvasDiscount.com just for fun!). I’m not sure if anyone would want the portrait art, but here are those file downloads just in case there’s someone out there who likes them: right-facing portrait, left-facing portrait. I don’t know either of the women I drew (or the man in the vintage painting)—they’re all just random lovely people!

I’m not going to share a download for the portrait painting since I don’t own the rights to that piece of art. I just wanted to try preserving the piece so that we can keep it in the family should anything happen to it. You can try doing the same thing if you want. I’ve started routinely taking close-up photos of all our vintage art just for the sake of preservation.

In the end, I chose an unframed canvas print with a folded border effect (the vintage male portrait), two framed photos with ‘Walnut Flair’ frames (the female drawings), and two stretched canvas prints with white frames (the paintings I liked best out of the three I did). I hung the pair of colorful abstract paintings above the chair in my office, and added the three black and white printed portraits to a gallery wall collection I had started using a few other portraits I already had.

I can’t even describe how energizing it is to work surrounded by art. It makes my office feel like such a creative space, and I’ve got this strong urge now to create more art during any free moment I might get from here on out.

Are there any types of art pieces you’d like to preserve from your own collection? As I said, I wanted to make sure I simplified this process as much as possible, which is why I used nothing but an iPhone to document the art pieces to have printed at CanvasDiscount.com. There’s practically nothing to it, and now I have a folder of all my most cherished art tucked safely away in my digital archives for posterity. Let me know what you’d have printed in the comments below, and use code “DREAMGREENDIY90” to get an extra 10% off already discounted items at CanvasDiscount.com (a total of 90% off!).