Bodes & Ollie: A David Bromstad Inspired Art Project

So while Sara (sister) was still in town from Spain, I decided to put her to work and help me splash some color onto my very "antique white" walls! Now, I am not allowed to paint in my building so I needed something large that would for sure make a statement. We googled everything you can possibly imagine and went to our trusty Pinterest for inspiration but nothing sparked our interest. Mom pulled through on this one and being a devoted HGTV viewer, she thought of David Bromstad's artwork. We pulled up this video on how to create a painting on canvas using one of his techniques. Let me tell you...Mr. Bromstad makes this look good and easy...Sary and I felt it was more of a struggle BUT it did end up coming together. We started off with little baby size canvases so we could test the technique. We laid down plastic bags and then old tee shirt rags on top to catch the drippings of paint and water. We then copied exactly what

David's video instructed but the paint didn't seem to have the dripping effect. We kept spraying and spraying water to get the color to run but it just wasn't working. Because there was so much water on the canvas, we were able to just wipe off the color and then start over. We did it a couple more times and thought we had a failed DIY.

What we figured out from the little test paintings is that the paint wasn't running thick enough to cover the bottom so we painted the bottom half of our larger canvases and then still used the dripping technique at the top but now it was dripping over top of color rather than a blank canvas. I used a heavily coated sponge brush at the top and my sister would spray at the paint to start to get it to run down the canvas. David would also drip a random color down the canvas which looked beautiful but it ended up looking like a hot mess so we didn't do much of

that. I actually tackled the larger middle canvas by myself. I was scared because sometimes I like perfection and this was a super imperfect job. I once again had sprayed the canvas quite a bit and it still wasn't dripping so in frustration I started slinging paint straight out of the tube in a swooping motion. With the paint tube facing downward I simply swooped upward in a straight line and it actually naturally started sliding down the canvas. It seemed to work and I love it! Here is a picture of the canvases hanging on my wall...Excuse my messy bookshelves which is another DIY coming soon!