Vintage Poster Art and Easy Image Transferring

I scored big at a little thrift shop by my house this week. I had a few minutes before I had to pick up kids, so I ran in to see what they had. I ended up with a whole armful of stuff! It’s been a while since I’ve gotten that lucky at a thrift store, so I was pretty excited. You’ll see some of the other finds later, but for today, here’s one of the things I came home with:

What? Not impressed?

It’s not my style either, that’s for sure.

I would guess it’s been hanging on the wall at that thrift store for quite a while. But it was BIG (22″x28″) and CHEAP (99 cents), and I needed some kind of art to finish off the nursery. So I gave it a little makeover.

First I painted a solid greyish-tan base coat over the whole thing.

Then I came up with what I wanted to put on it. I decided to make a vintage poster-inspired flower shop ad. I made the graphics in Photoshop, then printed them out true-to-size and taped all the sheets of paper together. It looked like this:

Then I used a brilliant little trick for transferring images. I rubbed the back side of the paper with brown pastel chalk, like this:

Then I placed the paper back on the canvas with the pastel part touching the surface and the printed side up. I traced over every line with a pencil and when I removed the paper, it looked like this:

Perfectly detailed outlines! This technique worked out so well. Just make sure you choose a chalk color that you won’t mind if some parts of it show… cuz they will. 🙂

The last step was to use craft paint and fill in all the shapes. I added a little oomph by outlining everything in white pastel chalk, which really made things pop. Check out the finished product:

So much better than the original, don’t ya think?!?

Yay! I love how it turned out. I’ve always had a thing for old posters and it has a little bit of that vibe going on, but still pulls all the nursery colors together. That’s the best part of DIY projects…you can make exactly what you want.

By the way, the big nursery reveal should be any day now. Just a few more projects to go and I’ve got to find the bag of screws to put the crib back together.

By the way, the big nursery reveal should be any day now. Just a few more projects to go and I’ve got to find the bag of screws to put the crib back together.