Painting Ombre

Hola. ¿Como esta frijole? 

¿Le gusta reir? 

I love to laugh and I love to make things that make me laugh. Whenever I am in need of some DIY wall decor, I almost always pick something funny and I especially love puns. Now, I don’t really consider myself trendy, and I’m okay with that. So, I have no idea if this ombre trend is over or not, but this makes me laugh which makes the trendiness of it totally irrelevant. I thought painting ombre was going to be much harder to execute, but it was totally easy.

¿Listo?

¡Vámanos!

El Ombre Hombre.

Ombre: having tones of color that shade into each other, graduating from light to dark

Hombre: a man, especially one of a particular type. “That is one ombre hombre.”

First thing’s first, pick your ombre colors. I know that pink to orange ombre seems a little random, but I was going off of some of the colors in the bedding of the guest room. When painting a gradient from one color to another, make sure they are in the same color family. The easiest and most fool-proof way to do this is to get your paint mixed in samples from Home Depot or Lowe’s and pick colors that are on the same level on your paint chip sample. I went with Dragon Fruit and Aurora Orange, both are the third color down on the sample chip.

Paint your background. If you want the finished piece of work to have a white background, paint it and don’t just leave it bare canvas. I have seen this too many times and it makes the painting look unfinished. After a ton of hard work on your main image, the last thing you want is for your work to look unprofesh. Speaking of unprofesh, I totally used leftover house paint from our most recent home reno. It’s super bright white and one thousand times better than unpainted white canvas. And free.

I taped off the edges of the canvas so I could paint the edges after the painting was completed.

For the Hombre, I used a stencil that I created with the Silhouette Cameo. I purchased a vector for a buck on VectorStock, did some editing in Photoshop to suit my needs and then added the word “HOMBRE” in the font Bebas Neue. I made sure that the image in Photoshop was actual size, 36″ x 36″, so that when imported into the Silhouette software, it would be cut at actual size. Grandé.

For this project, I knew I need a boat load of vinyl, but really didn’t want to pay boat load of money, so I used scraps. There are a couple ways to cut scraps with your Silhouette. You can measure the size of your scrap and try to fit what you can on each piece, then line them up and stick on your transfer tape all at once to transfer the whole image as one…

…Or, you can stick two scraps together and feed them through as one. Lift the vinyl off of one side of one piece of the vinyl about a half inch (or less, if you can) and stick that to your other piece of vinyl….

Then flip it over and tape down the backing to keep it from getting jammed up in your machine.

Feed it through like normal. Keep in mind that, in the places where the vinyl overlaps, you may need to go over the cuts with an exacto knife to account for the blade not going through both layers of material. This probably isn’t the best idea on intricate designs, but for a big project with easy cut lines, it’s a total money saver.

Once I had all my scraps cut and pieced, I found center and stuck the vinyl to the canvas and got busy.

I also added some clear contact paper from the side of the canvas to the image to prevent any sloppy paint drips from ruining the painting.

For the ombre, I didn’t want definite lines, so I didn’t want to used painter’s tape to divide the colors. Instead, I just mixed even amounts of pink and orange and started in the middle.

I painted the top pure pink, the bottom pure orange and the middle was an even mix of the two, that way, I knew exactly what I was working towards as I painted.

I mixed up my paint on some foil and did a little gradient testing at the same time. I used four different foam brushes, one for pink, one for orange, one for pink-orange, and one for orange-pink.

I worked in sections moving each color closer toward each other. Since the paint didn’t get total coverage with one coat, I had to wait for each section to dry and then added a second coat. I knew I wouldn’t be able to mix the colors the exact same way a second time, so I went over each section with a hair dryer real quick and then gave it a second coat. This also helped with the blending.

He looks like he’s en fuego.

Once it was all dry, I removed the vinyl and painted the edges orange. The word “Hombre” was slightly off center so I added a period to even it out.

There was a little bit of paint bleeding around the edges…

…so I went back with some white paint and a tiny brush and cleaned ’em up. There were so many layers of pink and orange paint that it made a nice little ridge for my tiny brush to glide along, keeping semi-straight lines.

¡Es todo!

¡Ole!

Have you painted anything ombre? Got any good tips?

Te gusta?!

jajajajajaja!