DIY: Paint-chip art

Here’s an easy way to make something spectacular for your walls — paint-chip punch-out art! You need: paint chips, a hole punch, a glue stick, a large piece of heavy weight paper and lots of patience!

I made a picture of a mommy and baby giraffe for my daughter’s nursery.

Start by punching out a whole bunch of paint chips in the shades you want. My suggestion is to pick two complementary colors (in my case coral + grey) and punch from the spectrum of lighter/darker colors around each one — this way you get some great gradation in your artwork. To keep it simple, use one color for the main graphic, and then the other color for your background.

Once you have enough punched out, start moving the pieces around to form the graphic you want. If you don’t have a design in mind, find a picture online and trace the outlines onto your paper to give you some guidance. Here are my giraffes taking shape, just using shades of coral:

Once you have the main graphic looking like you want it, glue each little dot down (this is the tedious part. Do it while you’re watching reruns or something).

Now you can move on to the background. I ended up making silhouettes of trees behind the giraffe using shades of grey. Glue away!

And to tie everything together, scatter a couple little dots in the shade of your main graphic into the background. Here’s the final picture:

And here it is in our nursery. I think it turned out really great, and my daughter really loves staring at the dots so I think she likes it too!

Good luck!