St. Patty's Subway Art

A few days ago I showed you my St. Patty's mantle where my subway art hangs and promised to show you how I made it. Let's discuss this idea of "subway art", first, though. WHY is it called subway art? What does that even MEEEAAAN?! I've taken the subway. A LOT. No fewer than 10 times a week, and sometimes more. I've never seen art in the subway. I've seen maps. I've seen ads. I've seen "tags." I've even seen, well, nothing you wanna hear about. None of it could be considered art. Somebody help me out here. Where did the name come from????

Ok, now that I've gotten that off my chest, let's talk about my wall hanging. First off, there's no way I could have done this freehand. Buuuuuuut....I wanted to decide what it was going to say and how it would be placed, so using someone else's image wasn't gonna do, either. Lucky for me, LeAna from A Small Snippet posted this Easy DIY Handpainted Canvas tutorial. The trick is transferring pencil marks, which is something I wouldn't have even know existed if not for her post :) Knowing what steps I'd be taking, I downloaded some free fonts and got to work with an image editor.

Don't forget your fadas!

This is what I came up with. Not all of the fonts included characters with fadas, so I made a little reminder to myself to add the ones that weren't printed. It came out a bit smaller than my canvas (don't ask...). From there, I followed LeAna's instructions and got t' tracin'. One of the commenters on her post suggested placing your print on a glass table with a lamp underneath. Pure genius.

I did this over the course of two evenings. No lie, I write hard and my hand cramped up after awhile. I DID have a large-ish image with a lot of letters, though. The knots in "sláinte" (which gets a fada over the "a" and I DID forget it, despite my note to myself) didn't help, either.

It worked! Holy crap! I totally expected it not to. Not because I didn't trust LeAna, but because that would just be my luck (contrary to popular belief, the Irish are NOT a lucky bunch). In the original tutorial, she tells us to place the print, right side up, on the canvas and trace back over the letters. I'm not a great tracer to begin with, so when I went back over, sometimes I didn't trace over the PENCIL MARKS on the backside if they didn't line up with where I traced the front. Did that make sense? So I scribbled over the front. True story. And I didn't have a pencil sharpener, so I went through three pencils because mechanical pencils, which we have in abundance, do NOT work well. But. There's always a but, isn't there? Three of my fonts had knots in them. You can see in the "MAR" that's not a huge problem, but where I used a smaller size font, you just can't get the detail [presumably] because of the texture of the canvas. See?

I removed them from one of the phrases (well, blessing, really), but left them in "sláinte." I also needed to outline the knots in black so they looked like knots and not just swirls once they were painted.

With the letters/knots in "sláinte," I used the pencil marks I WAS able to make out, and just kinda made up the parts I couldn't. If you look closely, you can see some of them don't actually work out proper like, but whataryag'nnado, right? Then I hung it, still wet. I didn't trust Boots not to destroy it trying to sharpen his claws on it or trust any of the three of them not to walk or sleep on it while it dried. So yeah, it went right on the wall. 

The Girl thinks we should leave it up year round. I'd consider it if it wasn't dated. Wish I'd thought of that...

TL;DR: 

1. Full instructions are on A Small Snippet and the specific post is HERE.
2. If you're using an image with a lot of words or detail, expect to take a break or few because your hand will hurt.
3. If you can put a light under your image, do.
4. Try to avoid small, extremely detailed fonts (such as ones with Celtic knots). Get rid of them completely, or use a larger font size.